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The events of the novel The Night Reporter take place in Lviv in 1938. Journalist Marko Krylovych, nicknamed the “night reporter” for his nightly coverage of the life of the city’s underbelly, takes on the investigation of the murder of a candidate for president of the city government. While doing this, he ends up in various love intrigues as well as criminal adventures, sometimes risking his life. Police Commissioner Roman Obukh, who was suspended by administrators from the murder investigation, aids him in an unofficial capacity. Meanwhile, German, and Soviet spies become involved, and Polish counterintelligence also takes an interest in the investigation. The picturesque and vividly described criminal world of Lviv of that time appears before us – dive bars, batyars, and establishments for women of ill repute. The reader will have to unravel riddle after riddle with the characters against the background of the anxious mood of Lviv’s residents, who are living in anticipation of war. The Night Reporter is a compelling journey into the world of the enthralling multicultural past of the city.
This powerfully-written first novel from Ukrainian author Anastasiia Marsiz is set in and around Cupra Marittima, a small seaside town on Italy’s Adriatic coast. So closely is the area described, the reader could find their way around without difficulty. They might easily go there expecting to find the Chalet Martina, a seafront restaurant opening onto the beach. To enter the restaurant is to step into the territory of fiction, but in Marsiz’s expert hands the boundary is crossed unconsciously. At the Chalet, we meet Martina Marino, her husband Adriano, their two sons and two daughters – about each of whom there is a story to be lovingly told. Even before our first encounter with Marti...
‘“Brother, you have another pair of boots,” Jaroslav Hašek said to me, grabbing me by the sleeve. “How do you know?” “Yesterday you were in army boots, and today you’ve got civilian ones on. I’d buy those army boots off you.” And in this way my high-laced boots, which I was given by the Austrian Red Cross way back in Beryozovka-za-Baikalom, came into Hašek’s possession. It was a silly thing to do. Not because I should have known that I wouldn’t get a kopeck out of Hašek in exchange for them — at bottom, I did know that — but as a former soldier, I should have thought about reserves. Life is a war and in this war, sometimes boots become casualties.’ Thus ruefull...
The summer of 1980. The Moscow Olympics. A small pioneer camp on the banks of the Volga. The pioneers fall out, make up, play tricks. Romances start up among the young leaders. The river bus brings in drums of milk and boxes of pasta. Life in the quirky gingerbread cake buildings of the camp establishes its rhythms against the backdrop of the Volga’s ceaseless flow and the sunset’s daily blush over the Zhiguli mountains. But something, or someone, is at work. Something that no one except twelve-year-old Valerka can see for what it is. When he confides in the young leader Igor, only to be disbelieved, Valerka finds himself carrying the burden of what he knows completely alone. Valerka res...
A philosopher obstinately searching for truth in the 1700s, badgered by the church for speaking out on human rights and the hypocrisy of the ruling elite, Skovoroda was forced to live an unsettled life. Hryhoriy Skovoroda (1722–1794), dubbed a “wandering” philosopher, was one of the most colourful figures in 18th century Ukraine. He spent most of his life travelling about the country and spoke out in defence of justice and freedom for the common folk, often to his own detriment. His songs became folk songs, and his parables helped drive philosophical thought in many Slavic countries. Precursor is a panoramic, factually accurate novel, painting a realistic picture of life in the Russian Empire. It is an illustration of the epitaph on Skovoroda’s gravestone: “The world pursued me, but failed to catch me.”
‘Perhaps some day I’ll disappear forever,’ muses the master-builder Psymmachus in Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Cleopatra and Caesar, ‘Becoming one with my work...’ Today, exactly two hundred years from the poet’s birth, it is difficult not to hear Norwid speaking through the lips of his character. The greatest poet of the second phase of Polish Romanticism, Norwid, like Gerard Manley Hopkins in England, created a new poetic idiom so ahead of his time, that he virtually ‘disappeared’ from the artistic consciousness of his homeland until his triumphant rediscovery in the twentieth century. Chiefly lauded for his lyric poetry, Norwid also created a corpus of dramatic works astonishi...
Srđan Srdić’s collection of short stories, Combustions, establishes this author’s position as one of the best prose writers in Serbia and across the region. This book consists of nine stories in which the author brings the reader face to face with the seamy side of everyday life, where, somewhere in the province, hopelessness and despair of the endless Balkan transition meet one another in the most radical way. Devoid of illusions of social engagement and narrative tricks, Srdić linguistically demolishes the present and its numerous platitudes, either liberal or conservative, with which we have been overwhelmed for years, to the extent that we can no longer discern the depth of the tw...
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, SOFSEM 2016, held in Harrachov, Czech Republic, in January 2016. The 43 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 116 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: foundations of computer science; software engineering: methods, tools, applications; and data, information, and knowledge engineering. The volume also contains 7 invited talks in full paper length.
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Computer Science Symposium in Russia, CSR 2011, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2011. The 29 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. The scope of topics of the symposium was quite broad and covered basically all areas of the foundations of theoretical computer science.
This is the first full-length study of Demetrius of Alexandria (189–232 ce), who generated a neglected, yet remarkable hagiographic program that secured him a positive legacy throughout the Middle Ages and the modern era. Drawing upon Patristic, Coptic, and Arabic sources spanning a millennium, the analysis contextualizes the Demetrian corpus at its various stages of composition and presents the totality of his hagiographic corpus in translation. This volume constitutes a definitive study of Demetrius, but more broadly, it provides a clearly delineated hagiographic program and charts its evolution against a backdrop of political developments and intercommunal interactions. This fascinating study is a useful resource for students of Demetrius and the Church in Egypt in this period, but also for anyone working on Early Christianity and hagiography more generally.