At the beginning of the twentieth century, 1908, a young Kyivan, Klym Koshovy miraculously flies the coop and escapes from persecution by tsarist police to Lviv. However, even here he is arrested - near the corpse of a well-known local lawyer Yevhen Soyka. The deceased had dubious friends and powerful enemies in the city. Suicide or murder? The search for truth leads Koshovy through the dark labyrinths of Lviv's streets. On his way - facing pickpockets, criminal kingpins and Russian terrorist bombers. And Klym is constantly getting in the way of the police commissioner Marek Wichura. The truth will stun Klym, and his new loyal friend Jozef Shatsky. It will forever change the fate of the enigmatic and influential beauty Magda Bohdanovych. This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Grant Program. Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, 1908, a young Kyivan, Klym Koshovy miraculously flies the coop and escapes from persecution by tsarist police to Lviv. However, even here he is arrested - near the corpse of a well-known local lawyer Yevhen Soyka. The deceased had dubious friends and powerful enemies in the city. Suicide or murder? The search for truth leads Koshovy through the dark labyrinths of Lviv's streets. On his way - facing pickpockets, criminal kingpins and Russian terrorist bombers. And Klym is constantly getting in the way of the police commissioner Marek Wichura. The truth will stun Klym, and his new loyal friend Jozef Shatsky. It will forever change the fate of the enigmatic and influential beauty Magda Bohdanovych. This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Grant Program. Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor.

Hryhory Skovoroda is considered by many as the first great Slavic philosopher and poet. Written over a period stretching from the 1750s until 1785, his The Garden of Divine Songs is a unique collection of 30 poems, featuring a complex system of strophic structures and with only a few of the songs written in a traditional way. Skovoroda never repeats one and the same strophic structure; this being the case, his Garden of Divine Songs according to writer-scholar Valery Shevchuk functions as a “practical guide to the art of poetry”, exemplifying all the meters and strophic patterns that were possible in Ukrainian poetry of that time. The poet makes masterful use of the accomplishments of academic poetry; the so-called “songs of the world” are the most prominent poems in this collection. These songs are an expression of Skovoroda's views in poetic form, and many ideas from The Garden of Divine Songs, such as the search for happiness in the world in song 21, would later form the basis for some of Skovoroda’s philosophical treatises. Skovoroda’s originality, and his ability to approach the most cardinal problems of human existence, stem from his capacity to combine known motifs, borrowed from literary sources such as classical texts, the Bible, and ancient Ukrainian poetic works, with his own system of thinking that focuses on his philosophy of the heart. The complete poems of Skovoroda are appearing in their entirety here in English for the first time, accompanied by a guest introduction by prominent Ukrainian writer Valery Shevchuk. This title has been realised by a team of the following dedicated professionals: Translated by Michael M. Naydan with an introduction by Valery Shevchuk Translations Edited by Olha Tytarenko Maxim Hodak - Максим Ходак (Publisher), Max Mendor - Макс Мендор (Director), Ksenia Papazova (Managing Editor).

This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanisław Lem. It offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem’s early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem’s published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer’s life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem’s parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.

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.

Painting a tortured picture of life’s harsh brutality in the region, Maria provides an insight into the complicated history of this remote corner of the Carpathian Mountains. Against the colourful backdrop of local traditions and highlanders’ rites she weaves her story of love, intertwined with a heart wrenching human tragedy, not avoiding intimate details of the anatomy of relationships between men and women. Enchanted by the impeccable style of this family saga, the reader becomes baffled by the character’s actions. In the words of Maria Matios the book is about people’s deeply concealed nature. When familiar passions like love and hate, joy and envy overcome them and it’s not in their nature to resist, consequences reach the catastrophic magnitude. Each character is flawed, detestable, but in the book’s finale they incite compassion as their painful past is steadily revealed. The eternal dilemma of sin and atonement pervades the pages of this book. The author does not shy away from carnal encounters and masterfully describes the psychology of lovers, accentuating people’s struggles on different levels.