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Orchestra
This novel by Russian novelist and screenwriter Vladimir Gonik is set in eleven countries around the world. Orchestra is based on documentary materials: the author has delved into the archives and met eyewitnesses, and now he recounts secret operations that took place across the globe in the second half of the twentieth century. The novel tells of certain little-known and mysterious events, some of which the author was personally involved in, and it is a story of extraordinary human lives, and of course, love... Vladimir Gonik was born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1939, and studied medicine in the Latvian city of Riga. He has been a foundry worker, a hospital orderly, a sailor on oceanic vessels, and a medic in the army. A keen athlete, he has practiced boxing, football, cross-country and downhill skiing, and he has served as a physician for Russian national teams and Olympic delegations in various sports. Alongside his other pursuits, he is a graduate of Moscow’s Institute of Cinematography. He is the author of twelve screenplays and seven books, and his work has been recognized with international and Russian awards for cinema.
Everyday Stories
This collection of short writings depicts different aspects of ordinary life: work, love, friends, family, sex, as well as language identity, immigration to the Wonderland, and nostalgia for the lost home. Often ironic about herself and her characters, Mima plays with genres to create a loosely-connected narrative throughout different stories. Her collection of “short” stories about the everyday include horror stories, a turnip tale, and a dictionary of unfamiliar words, among others, and a range of peculiar characters, such as Little Girl, Fear, Titoslav (Tisi, or T.), and Zoka, a boy from the Balkans, which are “probably somewhere in South America.” Seasoned with the author’s street maxims, the book is about the vicissitudes of life, East meeting West and West meeting East, and the ordinary that is extraordinary. Everyday Stories were first published in Bosnian as Obične Priče in 2018 by Bratstvo Duša, a well-known underground books and comics publishing house from Zagreb, Croatia, founded and run by the underground legend from ex-Yugoslavia, Zdenko Franjić. The black-and-white illustrations by Elvis Dolić contribute to the book’s unique character and indie feel.
Głosy / Voices
In December 1970, amid a harsh winter and an even harsher economic situation, the ruling communist regime in Poland chose to drastically raise prices on basic foodstuffs. Just before the Christmas holidays, for example, the price of fish, a staple of the traditional Christmas Eve meal, rose nearly 20%. Frustrated citizens took to the streets to protest, demanding the repeal of the price-hikes. Things took an especially dramatic turn in the northern regions near the Baltic shore — later, the cradle of the Solidarity movement, which would eventually spark the fall of communism in Poland and throughout Central and Eastern Europe — where the government moved against their citizens with the M...
On the Road to Freedom
‘“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...
Khatyn
It is a quiet place, with lush green grass covering the location of the former Belarusian village. A village that was burned to the ground with its inhabitants in 1943. Anyone familiar with this small corner of Eastern Europe is chilled to the bone by the events that transpired there, and the village’s name Khatyn has now come to embody a horrific national tragedy. But tragedy is not all this name embodies, for it also reminds people of the tremendous courage of those who fought for the life and freedom of their country. It is the story of this village and the events that surround its annihilation that are the focus of Ales Adamovich’s novel Khatyn, which was written on the basis of hist...
Slavdom
‘Why do you whimper and wail, O Tatra streams and rivers, who carry your plaintive lament resounding to the sea?’ asks the narrator toward the end of The Slovaks, in Ancient Days, and Now. They respond: ‘Because our human compatriots do not join together in memory, as we our waters mix with our origin, and because their lives do not resound booming, but roll on unconsciously, like hidden streams, silently to the sea of the life of the nations, young man!’ This quotation from the most famous prose work of Ľudovít Štúr (1815 – 1856) might be set as a motto to the literary career of Slovakia’s greatest Romantic poet, publicist, and political activist. For all of Štúr’s writi...
The Nuremberg Trials
Postwar Nuremberg is set to host a historically unprecedented trial of the leaders of the defeated Third Reich. The whole world is awaiting a just verdict, but it is here where Soviet counterintelligence must wage a secret war against forces that seek to prevent that from happening at any cost. Nuremberg, having been nearly wiped from the face of the earth during the harsh fighting, becomes an arena for ruthless struggles in both hidden and overt operations. Nazis are still operating underground, spies weave their intrigues, politicians and diplomats make bargains, and movie stars dazzle the public. The enormous efforts led by the USSR’s chief prosecutor Roman Rudenko to expose the Nazi at...
Moscow
Linchpin of the Soviet system and exemplar of its ideology, Moscow was nonetheless instrumental in the Soviet Union's demise. It was in this metropolis of nine million people that Boris Yeltsin, during two frustrating years as the city's party boss, began his move away from Communist orthodoxy. Colton charts the general course of events that led to this move, tracing the political and social developments that have given the city its modern character. He shows how the monolith of Soviet power broke down in the process of metropolitan governance, where the constraints of censorship and party oversight could not keep up with proliferating points of view, haphazard integration, and recurrent dev...
New York Magazine
New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.
The Vow
Can something that exists merely as a literary text, say a story, come about in real life? Can reality, to put it another way, steal something from literature, the same way literature steals from reality? Such is the question that Libor Hrach, the author of The Adventures of the Wise Badger, fields one evening over a hedonistic supper in a tony Brno restaurant from Kamil Modráček, himself a burrowing animal of sorts, in Jiří Kratochvil’s novel The Vow. ‘Quite simply, I said, everything that has been written either has already happened, or is about to. You write a story, and you can never be sure if what you’re writing isn’t actually taking place two streets away from where you si...
