The book is dedicated to the most mysterious city connecting Europe and Asia — Istanbul. The heir of ancient Byzantium, the city became the successor of the great Constantinople — the capital of the largest Orthodox empire of the Middle Ages, turning into the center of the Ottoman Empire and an attraction for Muslims from all over the world. The everyday life of Istanbul in its brilliant era,...

Andre Aciman's Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the...

'Goodbye To Berlin' is the original story of the chanteuse heroine Sally Bowles. Isherwood ironically captures life in Weimar Berlin, a city infamous for its flourishing demimonde and violent politics.

This book was conceived by the author as a textbook, but as he worked on it, it turned into a confession of a man who invested his life in a lost, but no less interesting, matter — the study of Russian culture. A sick product of a sick system, Russian culture is doomed to perish along with the system. Russian civilization, according to Dmitry Bykov, can still function for some time —...

Alexander Rodnyansky analyzes the cultural and social life of Russia in the 2000s and early 2020s using nine films he produced as examples. Cinema, Rodnyansky believes, reflects changing moods in society better than any social surveys. In this book, he recalls his professional path — from Fyodor Bondarchuk’s 'The 9th Company' to Vladimir Bitokov’s 'Mom, I’m Home' — to understand how, against...

Is it possible to talk to a child about war? How to tell him about what is happening in the world now? How to resist school propaganda? What to do if a child cannot adapt to life in a new country? How to support him - without going crazy yourself?

The endless Russian flight brings the first wave of emigrants to the Balkans. They have only a couple of decades of peaceful life between two catastrophes — from the Civil War to the Second World War. Each turn of the novel puts the heroes — musicians, writers, journalists — before a classic collision of the 20th century: how to remain human in the millstones of history. And each of them...

This book is the third in a documentary series about the fates of Soviet writers. The first, ‘The Knot. Poets of Friendship and Breaks,’ is dedicated to the 1920s and 1930s. The second, ‘Noah’s Ark of Writers,’ is about the evacuation of Soviet writers and their families during the war to Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Chistopol, and Yelabuga. Together, these books create a kind of fresco of Soviet...

This book is a chronicle of an unprecedented exposure of torture, tacitly legalized in Russian prisons. An ordinary guy from Belarus, Sergei Savelyev, was sent to a Russian prison on a fabricated drug case and first experienced the bloody hell of ‘re-education’. Later, when he was recruited to work as an administrator in a prison hospital, he gained access to a gigantic video archive stored...

‘The Hopak Equation’ by Ukrainian writer Lesha Palkich has the subtitle ‘about a war without war.’ In this parable novel, a southerner, a family man, good-natured, is forced to go to war with the northerners in order to earn money to save his son. But what kind of war is this? ‘The inhabitants of the North and South were one people in ancient times...’ The massacre started by the government...