Download or read book The Sarabande of Sara s Band written by Larysa Denysenko and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarabande is a novel presented mostly through the rapid-fire interactions of the characters in one-on-one situations or in small groups. Most of the novel revolves around the male protagonist, the journalist Pavlo Dudnyk, who takes his schoolhood friend Sara Polonsky as his second wife. Sara, who blossomed from an inconspicuous overweight adolescent into a vivacious woman, used to mock him in school with the nickname “Underbutt” for his bony derriere that always needed padding on the classroom chairs. When Pavlo marries Sara, he doesn’t realize at first that he’s also married into her extended family, Sara’s band of Polonskys, with their myriad quirks and manifestations of peculiar behavior.
Download or read book Ukraine s Quest for Identity written by Maria G. Rewakowicz and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-18 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies. Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1991–2011 is the first study that looks at the literary process in post-independence Ukraine comprehensively and attempts to draw the connection between literary production and identity construction. In its quest for identity Ukraine has followed a path similar to other postcolonial societies, the main characteristics of which include a slow transition, hybridity, and identities negotiated on the center-periphery axis. This monograph concentrates on major works of literature produced during the first two decades of independence and places them against the background of clearly identifiable contexts such as regionalism, gender issues, language politics, social ills, and popular culture. It also shows that Ukrainian literary politics of that period privileges the plurality and hybridity of national and cultural identities. By engaging postcolonial discourse and insisting that literary production is socially instituted, Maria G. Rewakowicz explores the reasons behind the tendency toward cultural hybridity and plural identities in literary imagination. Ukraine’s Quest for Identity will appeal to all those keen to study cultural, social and political ramifications of the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and beyond.
Download or read book Herstories An Anthology of New Ukrainian Women Prose Writers written by Michael M. Naydan and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s prose writing has exploded on the literary scene in Ukraine just prior to and following Ukrainian independence in 1991. Over the past two decades scores of fascinating new women authors have emerged. These authors write in a wide variety of styles and genres including short stories, novels, essays, and new journalism. In the collection you will find: realism, magical realism, surrealism, the fantastic, deeply intellectual writing, newly discovered feminist perspectives, philosophical prose, psychological mysteries, confessional prose, and much more.
Download or read book The Mouseiad and other Mock Epics written by Ignacy Krasicki and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International brigades of mice and rats join forces to defend the rodents of Poland, threatened with extermination at the paws of cats favoured by the ancient ruler King Popiel, a sybaritic, cowardly ruler... The Hag of Discord incites a vicious rivalry between monastic orders, which only the good monks’ common devotion to... fortified spirits... is able to allay... The present translation of the mock epics of Poland’s greatest figure of the Enlightenment, Ignacy Krasicki, brings together the Mouseiad, the Monachomachia, and the Anti-monachomachia — a tongue-in-cheek ‘retraction’ of the former work by the author, criticised for so roundly (and effectively) satirising the faults of the Church, of which he himself was a prince. Krasicki towers over all forms of eighteenth-century literature in Poland like Voltaire, Swift, Pope, and LaFontaine all rolled into one. While his fables constitute his most well-known works of poetry, in the words of American comparatist Harold Segel, ‘the good bishop’s mock-epic poems [...] are the most impressive examples of his literary gifts.’ This English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski is rounded off by one of Krasicki’s lesser-known works, The Chocim War, the poet’s only foray into the genre of the serious, Vergilian epic.
Download or read book A Flame Out at Sea written by Dmitry Novikov and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The characters in Novikov’s work are predominantly people of the Russian North: Pomors, Karelians and Komi. In 2013 Novikov, along with other Karelian writers, proclaimed the Manifesto on a New Northern Prose, the mission of which Novikov described as: “Though these are trying times for Russian literature, there is light, there is hope that it will retain its key underlying principles of honesty, faith, beauty. How great it is that these principles fully fit with and correspond to the old and new, living, and strong direction of Russia’s Northern Prose!” *** The protagonist of A Flame Out at Sea heads to the stores of the northern lakes and the White Sea in search of its present, which unexpectedly proves to be inseparable from its recent past. Against the backdrop of the powerful northern elements, the drama of a single individual in the here and now begins to seem tiny and insignificant but the tragedy of the nation irredeemably large. "The novel is a confession, a travelogue and a doorway into a great historical era.” A Flame Out at Sea is about going beyond the boundaries of the big city, about overcoming the fetters of one’s private and family past, leaving aside one’s resentment, squashing one’s pride, unclenching one’s fists and turning one’s life around. It is about a journey to the origins of speech, personality, courage and love made by a modern man in the harsh, sacred, nourishing and draining circumstances of the Russian North. (Valeria Pustovaya, Literary critic) Translated from the Russian by Christopher Culver Published with support of the Russian Booker Foundation Sponsored by GLOBEXBANK Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor
Download or read book The Food Block written by Alexei Ivanov and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 resists the vampires on principle, while Igor finally joins forces with him only when what is happening touches him personally. Together, they brace themselves to do battle with a power they have no reason to believe they can withstand. Ivanov brings us a gallery of colourful characters: idealistic, dogged Valerka; seventeen-year-old Igor, groping to find himself and on the way finding his first love; the spiky and beautiful Veronika; the blithely self-absorbed Anastasiika; the drunken doctor who knows too much; the steadily-growing cast of bloodsuckers and their ‘carcasses’. Through them, Ivanov gives us both a thriller and a book of subtlety and depth. Building steadily towards its enthralling climax, The Food Block crackles with delightful dialogue, exudes humour that does not make fun, and explores with apparently effortless insight the loves and energy, hopes and doubts, and fears and courage of childhood and youth.
Download or read book The Revenge of the Foxes written by Ak Welsapar and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moscow, during the collapse of the Soviet system: In a hospital, young people awaiting heart operations and possible death, live just for today with mischief-making and even love affairs, under the stringent gaze of the old matron, Baba Nastya. Here one of the patients, a young Turkmen, meets a Greek Comsomol boy, a Russian Stalinist with a ‘robotic’ heart, and the lovely but tragic Mary. To whom does the future belong – to the soulless robots or the poetical souls?
Download or read book Precursor written by Vasyl Shevchuk and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book Conversations before Silence written by Oles Ilchenko and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a tendency to collapse into itself, often forcing the reader to reevaluate a word or line, to reread a previous word to focus on the poet’s inner logic. This fragmentary incompleteness and permeability mimics much the way human consciousness works without the filter of the written communicative convention of sentences and grammatical structure. This “slipperiness” and rapid shifting of voice comprises one of the essential invariants in Ilchenko’s poetics. The poet also flaunts many traditional poetic Ukrainian conventions. Like ee cummings he tends to avoid capital letters or punctuation such as exclamation points. One will find only commas and dashes for pauses, and an occasional period in his poems, which do not always end with the finality of that punctuation mark. In doing this, the poet often suggests a fragment or slice of his life broken off on the page and to be continued at some point in time. He is a fascinating poet whose idiom and unique manner of expression translates seamlessly into the poetics of contemporary English.
Download or read book Tefil written by Rafał Wojasiński and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2024-06-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rafał Wojasiński’s new engaging masterpiece Tefil, we come across a curious – and eerie – situation. A young man named Rozmaryn finds a photograph depicting his mother in the company of a stranger. He lost both his parents at an early age, and never even knew his mother. So he sets off in search of that stranger, and this leads him to one of the most articulate, yet unsettling and possibly mentally handicapped characters as can be found anywhere in literature: Tefil. A balding and somewhat odiferous inhabitant of a garret flat in a sleepy town somewhere in Poland, never married, Tefil, who spent his working years as a village factotum, now exists as something of a self-interested Oxfam bin collecting the clothes of the dead. He also goes to extreme lengths to avoid paying back insignificant debts and cadging pastries, coffee, and sometimes alcoholic dinners, from passers-by to whom he attaches himself like a tick. He also philosophises, disparaging the sense of human life, and singing a paean to “all-conquering mould”, which is the only living creature that cannot be destroyed (supposedly, it even survives being eaten and digested), and which is fated to overcome – to consume – all other life, including man and his civilisation. How does that make us feel, as human beings ourselves? Rafał Wojasiński’s character is challenging, repulsive, and yet fatally attractive. Like Rozmaryn, we cannot tear ourselves away from his rushing stream of words and ideas, which fascinate us while filling us with existential dread. But is Tefil serious? Or is he just spilling an unending yarn, talking for the sake of hearing his unquestionably spellbinding voice? One hopes it is the latter, and it just might be. For Tefil is a poetic novel, something in the line of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; something of a literary equivalent to absolute music and non-representational painting. Standing before Wojasiński’s puzzling canvas, hearing his dissonant composition through to the end, the reader might be left bewildered – but will certainly not find his time spent with Tefil unrewarding.
Download or read book Slavdom written by Ľudovít Štúr and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-07 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘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 writings aim at one goal: the propagation of the national traditions of the Slovaks in an age when their nation was threatened with such repression from the Magyar majority in Hungary, that the complete extinction of the Slovak language and culture was a real possibility. Slavdom: A Selection of his Writings in Prose and Verse presents the reader with a wide selection of the creative output of a great Slovak writer, and an important Pan-Slav thinker. Divided in three parts: ‘Slovakia,’ ‘Pan-Slavism’ and ‘Russia,’ it reflects the development of Štúr’s thought, from his insistence on the importance of the Slovak past and the quality of Slovak culture, through his attempts to find a modus vivendi within the Austro-Hungarian Empire by uniting all of the Slavic nations of Austria together in a federation under the Habsburg crown (Austro-Slavism) to his arguments for all Slavs to unite under the hegemony of Russia, when the events following the Spring of the Peoples in 1848 proved Austro-Slavism a dead alley. Slavdom offers a generous selection of Štúr’s writings, from Slavic apologetics such as The Contribution of the Slavs to European Civilisation though selections of his poetry, chiefly, the two great chansons de geste centring on the ancient Great Moravian Empire: Svatoboj and Matúš of Trenčín. A must read for anyone interested in Slovak literature, Pan-Slavism, and European Romanticism in general. This book was published with a financial support from SLOLIA, Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava.
Download or read book Robinson written by Aram Pachyan and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robinson is the first book by Aram Pachyan, which earned him the highest governmental award in Armenia, The Presidential Prize for Literature. The volume is made up of 16 short stories; each story is like a small but sharp painting of various characters. The faces in these paintings look very familiar, like someone you know, or someone hiding deep inside you. An inescapable loneliness of people in the modern world is the main topic of the stories by Pachyan. This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Program.
Download or read book A Brown Man in Russia written by Vijay Menon and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brown Man in Russia describes the fantastical travels of a young, colored American traveler as he backpacks across Russia in the middle of winter via the Trans-Siberian. The book is a hybrid between the curmudgeonly travelogues of Paul Theroux and the philosophical works of Robert Pirsig. Styled in the vein of Hofstadter, the author lays out a series of absurd, but true stories followed by a deeper rumination on what they mean and why they matter. Each chapter presents a vivid anecdote from the perspective of the fumbling traveler and concludes with a deeper lesson to be gleaned. For those who recognize the discordant nature of our world in a time ripe for demagoguery and for those who want to make it better, the book is an all too welcome antidote. It explores the current global climate of despair over differences and outputs a very different message – one of hope and shared understanding. At times surreal, at times inappropriate, at times hilarious, and at times deeply human, A Brown Man in Russia is a reminder to those who feel marginalized, hopeless, or endlessly divided that harmony is achievable even in the most unlikely of places.
Download or read book Maybe We re Leaving written by Jan Balaban and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young boy from the housing estates comes across a copse of old oaks to which he can escape, as to an oasis of calm. Although he may forget about it once he becomes an adult and “puts aside the things of childhood,” it will remain a locus of balance, decades later, for a single mother struggling with the difficulties of raising the child she loves. A husband, on the lip of an ugly divorce, drives across town in the middle of the night to rescue his wife, abandoned by her lover, and then — as she falls asleep in the car — takes the long way home, to prolong a moment such as he has not experienced in years. An elderly doctor, self-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, makes use of the few precious moments of consciousness granted him each morning to pass on to his grandson what he has learned about life and living responsibly. Loss, and permanence, the ephemeral and the eternal, are common themes of Jan Balabán’s collection of short stories Maybe We’re Leaving, presented here in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski. With psychological insight that rivals the great novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the twenty-one linked narratives that make up the collection present us with everyday people, with everyday problems — and teach us to love and respect the former, and bear the latter. Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
Download or read book Jesus Cat written by Grig and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-07-28 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesus’ Cat is the first book by this young prose writer. The stories involved in this collection reveal, on the one hand, a unique writing style, and on the other, an original perspective on the world and people. This combination allows characters to develop in Grig’s creative space that helps readers discover another invisible side of life. This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Program. Translated from the Armenian by Nazareth Seferian.
Download or read book The Door Was Open written by Karine Khodikyan and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The short fiction of Karine Khodikyan can be described as intellectual fiction for women. These short stories with a “mystical touch” tell stories about women – young and old, happy and sad; even when the protagonist is not a woman, the story will immerse you into the life of a woman, revealing her role in anything and everything. This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Program.
Download or read book Dramatic Works written by Cyprian Kamil Norwid and published by Glagoslav Publications. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘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 astonishing in their breadth, from the Shakespearean Cleopatra and Caesar cited above, through the mystical dramas Wanda and Krakus, the Unknown Prince, both of which foretell the monumental style of Stanisław Wyspiański, whom Norwid influenced, and drawing-room comedies such as Pure Love at the Sea Baths and The Ring of the Grande Dame which combine great satirical humour with a philosophical depth that can only be compared to the later plays of T.S. Eliot. All of these works, and more, are collected in Charles S. Kraszewski’s English translation of Norwid’s Dramatic Works, which along with the major plays also includes selections from Norwid’s short, lyrical dramatic sketches — something along the order of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s Dramatic Works will be a valuable addition to the library of anyone who loves Polish Literature, Romanticism, or theatre in general.
