This book is mid-career comprehensive resume of sorts about one of the most original and innovative contemporary filmakers and artists. It contains ten essays, a wide selection of production notes, storyboards, letters, reviews and interviews, as well as Manchevski's own theoretical essays and fiction.
On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.
You can learn more about the author and Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich in this blog post on CEERES' East from Chicago Blog, which summarizes our 2016 roundtable on the writer.
From 1979 to 1989 a million Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed 50,000 casualties―and the youth and humanity of many tens of thousands more. Creating controversy and outrage when it was first published in the USSR―it was called by reviewers there a “slanderous piece of fantasy” and part of a “hysterical chorus of malign attacks”―Zinky Boys presents the candid and affecting testimony of the officers and grunts, nurses and prostitutes, mothers, sons, and daughters who describe the war and its lasting effects. What emerges is a story that is shocking in its brutality and revelatory in its similarities to the American experience in Vietnam. The Soviet dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins (hence the term “Zinky Boys”), while the state denied the very existence of the conflict. Svetlana Alexievich brings us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan War: the beauty of the country and the savage Army bullying, the killing and the mutilation, the profusion of Western goods, the shame and shattered lives of returned veterans. Zinky Boys offers a unique, harrowing, and unforgettably powerful insight into the realities of war.
You can learn more about the author and Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich in this blog post on CEERES' East from Chicago Blog, which summarizes our 2016 roundtable on the writer.
Zlata and Srebra are 12-year-old twins conjoined at the head. It is 1984 and they live in Skopje, which will one day be the capital of Macedonia but is currently a part of Yugoslavia. A Spare Life tells the story of their childhood, from their only friend Roze to their neighbor Bogdan, so poor that he one day must eat his pet rabbit. Treated as freaks and outcasts—even by their own family—the twins just want to be normal girls. But after an incident that almost destroys their bond as sisters, they fly to London, determined to be surgically separated. Will this be their liberation, or only more tightly ensnare them?
At once extraordinary and quotidian, A Spare Life is a chronicle of two girls who are among the first generation to come of age under democracy in Eastern Europe. Written in touching prose by an author who is also a master poet, it is a saga about families, sisterhood, immigration, and the occult influences that shape a life. Funny, poignant, dark, and sharply observed, Zlata and Srebra reveal an existence where even the simplest of actions is unlike any we’ve ever experienced.
Herman, a big city-living political and marketing expert, receives a call one morning that his brother has mysteriously disappeared, leaving him in charge of the gas station his brother ran. Herman returns to his hometown Luhansk---formerly known as Voroshilovgrad during the Soviet era---to take over his brother's business and figure out how to get himself out of this mess, but all he finds at home are mysteries, gangsters, and ghosts, drawing Herman further and further into a world he can't escape.
Voroshilovgrad mixes post-Soviet magical realism and postmodern road novel in a heady fusion that tears over the now war-torn endless eastern Ukrainian steppe, eerily presaging the Russian invasion that would come must a couple years after this book was originally published. The poetic, expressive prose that marks literary rockstar and deomcracy advocate Serhiy Zhadan's vivacious style sets apart this modern literary classic that was named the BBC Ukraine's "Book of the Decade" and which won Zhadan the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in Germany.
A contemporary classic from the Czech Republic. To support his family, a man submits himself to a solo science experiment in the High Andes. A cosmic adventure story of big ideas and murder. Your business is dead. It seems like a deal – leave your family behind in Prague for a year, isolate yourself in a research station in the Andes, and come home with a fortune. With a treatise on black holes for company, Jakob settles in at altitude. The air is thin. Strangers pass by on dangerous pilgrimage while his young wife and kids take life in his mind. In mountain starkness, the big questions take shape – like what happens to love inside a black hole?
Soviet Daughter provides a window into the life of a rebellious, independent woman coming of age in the USSR, and the impact of her story and her spirit on her American great-granddaughter.
This is the story of Julia Alekseyeva and her great-grandmother Lola, two extraordinary women swept up in the history of their tumultuous times. Born in 1910 to a poor, Jewish family outside of Kiev, Lola lived through the Bolshevik revolution, a horrifying civil war, Stalinist purges, and the Holocaust. She taught herself to read, and supported her extended family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became the KGB), a lieutenant for the Red Army, and later as a refugee in the United States. Interwoven with Lola's history we find Julia's own struggles of coming of age in an immigrant family in Chicago and her political awakening in the midst of the radical politics of the turn of the millenium.
At times heartbreaking and at times funny, this graphic novel memoir unites two generations of strong, independent women against a sweeping backdrop of the history of the USSR.
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This graphic novel was the subject of a CEERES Voices interview with the author. A full video of that interview is available on YouTube.
«Дом Аниты» - последний подпольный роман XX века. Известный художник и бывший узник Бухенвальда Борис Лурье писал его тайком по-английски. Дом Аниты – рабовладельческая организация в Нью-Йорке, похожая на немецкий концлагерь. Здесь же обитают призраки убитых евреев. Роман посвящен ритуалам этого тайного общества, которое постепенно распадается. Исчезает и прежний Нью-Йорк: в него прибывает Сталин и его танки, а рабы отправляются в Албанию, казавшуюся автору идеальным государством. В образе Аниты – владелицы лагеря – Лурье вывел свою подругу, легендарную галеристку Гертруду Стайн. Комментарии к этой книге написала Теренс Селлерс – «строгая госпожа» и приятельница Уильяма Берроуза.
One of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet, Linor Goralik writes conversational short works that conjure the absurd in all its forms, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Her mastery of the minimal, including a wide range of experiments in different forms of micro-prose, is on full display in this collection of poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview, here translated for the first time.
In Found Life, speech, condensed to the extreme, captures a vivid picture of fleeting interactions in a quickly moving world. Goralik's works evoke an unconventional palette of moods and atmospheres—slight doubt, subtle sadness, vague unease—through accumulation of unexpected details and command over colloquial language. While calling up a range of voices, her works are marked by a distinct voice, simultaneously slightly naïve and deeply ironic. She is a keen observer of the female condition, recounting gendered tribulations with awareness and amusement. From spiritual rabbits and biblical zoos to poems about loss and comics about poetry, Goralik's colorful language and pervasive dark comedy capture the heights of ridiculousness and the depths of grief.
