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It's the End of the World, My Love
Otherworldly forces, dark phantasmagoria, the horrors of underground life, adolescence and rebellion, myth and fairy tale all swirl in Alla Gorbunova's audacious and spectacular novel. Children, students, beggars, young poets: Alla Gorbunova's heroes and heroines live their lives intensely, experiencing the longing, joy, anticipation, and heartbreak of youth in 1990s Saint Petersburg. But Gorbunova's interconnected episodes don't limit themselves to the realm of the everyday, as they move from harsh, material realities to delirious dark fantasies. Characters escape, decline, self-destruct, and transform. In vivid prose she conjures a fragile and haunted society, and renders it with frank and uncompromising tenderness. A stunning work of fiction, It's the End of the World, My Love is a compassionate, terrifying, and rewarding book from an undeniable literary voice.
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.
Love in Defiance of Pain
Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories aims to bring the riches of contemporary Ukrainian literature—and of contemporary Ukraine, too—to the world. While Ukraine is under sustained attack, many in the West have marveled at the nation’s strength in the face of a barbaric invasion. Who are these people, what is this nation, which has captivated the world with their courage? By showcasing some of the finest Ukrainian writers working today, this book aims to help answer that question. There are war stories, but there are also love stories. Stories of aging romantics in modern Ukraine, and of modern Ukrainians in Vienna and Brooklyn, a fantastical tale set on a mysterious island where ...
Diary of an Invasion
One of the most important Ukrainian voices throughout the Russian invasion, the author of Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees collects his searing dispatches from the heart of Kyiv. This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. Andrey Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukr...
Remembering Transitions
This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies.
Driving Lessons
In this brilliant fiction debut from a legendary visual artist, thirteen interconnected stories explore friendship and intimacy, loneliness and dislocation, and the physical contours of a dilapidated American landscape. These stories, which first appeared as part of Coursey’s solo exhibition at The Pollock Gallery of SMU's Meadows School of the Arts, demonstrate the artist’s fascination with the broken-down and discarded relics of industry and labor. Coursey’s stories are laced with humor, conspiracy, paranoia, and compassion, exploring the ripple effects of violence, the mystery of a car found in a well, house-boat culture, Texas landscapes of machinery and dust. Objects possess a totemic importance as Coursey catalogs the detritus of American culture. These ornate vignettes present a colorful cast of characters and vivid scenery, demonstrating the author’s eye for detail both inanimate and human. Coursey spotlights work and deeds done by hand, and the artful, sculpted sentences reveal the writer’s care and facility as a linguistic craftsman.
The Freest Speech in Russia
The first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry and its embrace of freedom—formally, thematically, and spiritually Since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian poetry has exuded a powerful awareness of freedom, both aesthetic and political. No longer confined to the cultural underground, poets reacted with immediacy to events in the world. In The Freest Speech in Russia, Stephanie Sandler offers the first English-language study of contemporary Russian poetry, showing how these poems both express and exemplify freedom. This period was a time of great poetic flourishing for Russian poets, whether they remained in Russia or lived elsewhere. Sandler examines the work of ...
Isles of Firm Ground
In wondrous, singing translation by Mike Soto, these spare, striking poems by Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez explore the infinite solitude of the universe. The poems of Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez reflect a world precariously dependent on the word, but also transfixed by the word. They express a metaphysical shift where the laws of heaven and earth are suspended, transformed into a terrain of the journey inward, reflecting a cosmos of the self. The simplicity of these poems never fail to resonate, reflecting a profound investigation of the world on an elemental level. Ruiz-Pérez's poetry very often reads like the discovery of a formula, an algebra of poetic inquiry that draws together references to Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, and Alejandra Pizarnik. Deftly translated by poet Mike Soto, these poems express a singular vision of the abundance of the world as well as the void, but in these poems even the void is begged to speak.
Clandestinity
In this four-story suite, a modern master of Italian literature delves into the wonder, grotesquery, strangeness, and desire of the human condition. Combining and distorting elements of fables, fairy tales, and the alienating force of society, each of Moresco’s stories features the central character at a different time of his life: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood. In these beautiful and unsettling narratives, a vivid physical world can’t hide the strangeness of surroundings and the dream-like logic governing events. In “Blue Room,” the adolescent protagonist carries on a voyeuristic relationship with a blind old woman in a mysterious clinic. In the title story, a stunning act of violence deepens the nightmarish tones and the protagonist’s disorientation. Moresco’s stories, full of bodily parts, functions, and desires, present a world where physical curiosity competes with shame, and the price of watchfulness is the secrecy and loneliness of isolation.
A Boy in the City
In this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy. A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.” Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.
