This collection focuses on the war between Russia and Ukraine as seen by Russophone poets from all over the world.
“Monkey’s Defense” is a collection of short stories and parables by Nina Kossman.
This collection includes poems written in 2020-2023. (Russian edition)
“The Lingering Twilight” (“Сумерки”) is Marina Eskin’s fifth book of poems. (Russian edition)
Launched in 2012, “Four Centuries” is an international electronic magazine of Russian poetry in translation.
A collection of moving, often funny vignettes about a childhood spent in the Soviet Union.
“Vivid picture of life behind the Iron Curtain.” —Booklist
“This unique book will serve to promote discussions of freedom.” —School Library Journal
A book of poems by Maria Galina, put together and completed exactly one day before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is Galina’s seventh book of poems. With translations by Anna Halberstadt and Ainsley Morse.
A new collection of poems by Ian Probstein. (In Russian)
Young readers will love this delightful work of children’s verse by poet William Conelly, accompanied by Nadia Kossman’s imaginative, evocative illustrations.
Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was one of the most prolific Russian writers of the twentieth century. Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya, is a representative selection of Ehrenburg’s poetry, available in English for the first time.
The first bilingual (Russian-English) collection of poems by Aleksandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, “Elements for God” includes poems that predicted – and now chronicle – Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
A book of poems by Yulia Fridman.
“I have been reading Yulia Fridman’s poems for a long time and have admired them for a long time.” (Vladimir Bogomyakov, poet)
A collection of early poems by Zabolotsky, translated into English by Dmitri Manin. “Dmitri Manin’s translations retain the freshness of Zabolotsky’s vision.” – Boris Dralyuk
A collection of essays and reviews by Art Beck. “These pieces are selected from a steady series of essays and reviews I found myself publishing in the late aughts of the still early century.”
In this collection of 34 short stories, author Alexis Levitin, travel set in hand, takes the reader on a journey across several continents – and even into space – exploring the joys of chess and its effect on the lives of those who play.
A book of wartime poems by Alexandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, fighting for the independence of his country by means of words and rhymes.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
A collection of poems in Russian. Published by Khudozhestvennaya literatura (Художественная литература). Moscow, 1990.
This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!
“Cold War Casual” is a collection of transcribed oral testimony and interviews translated from Russian into English and from English into Russian that delve into the effect of the events and the government propaganda of the Cold War era on regular citizens of countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Julia Wiener’s novels focus on those moments when illusory human existence collapses in the face of true life, be it spiritual purity, love, old age, or death.
Evgeny Pinelis, an intensive care physician in a New York City hospital, was born in Moscow to a family of doctors, graduated from medical school, and works in the United States. “Vsyo Nichevo” (literal translation: “All Nothing” or “Everything’s Okay”) is his debut book.
Julia Wiener’s youth coincided with the “Thaw” period, and her maturity – with the years of “Soviet stagnation”, which, in her case, ended with emigration to Israel in the early 1970s. She describes her wartime childhood, her Komsomol-student youth, her subsequent disillusionment, and her meetings with well-known writers in a humorous style and colorful detail. She brings to life colorful characters – from her Moscow communal apartment neighbors to a hippie London lord, or an Arab family, headed by a devotee of classical Russian literature.
A novel by Ali Bader, an award-winning Iraqi novelist, essayist, poet, scriptwriter, and journalist who has written ten novels that won 5 Arabic literary awards, several works of non-fiction and two poetry collections. Author of the novel <em>Papa Sartre</em> (AUC Press, 2009). Ali Bader, who had covered the Middle East as a war correspondent, lives in Belgium.
These English poems by Gari have the same energy and elegance as his Russian poems, and they are enriched by his multilayered, polyphonic use of the English language to express thoughts and feelings with sophistication and humor.
This new edition by Shearsman Press (UK) contains translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s narrative poems (поэмы). They can be seen as markers of various stages in her poetic development, ranging from the early, folk-accented On a Red Steed to the lyrical-confessional Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End to the more metaphysical later poems, An Attempt at a Room, Poem of the Mountain, a beautiful requiem for Rainer Maria Rilke, New Year’s Greetings, and Poem of the Air, a stirring celebration of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the quest for the soul’s freedom. These translations were first published by Ardis in 1998 and reprinted by Overlook in 2004 and 2009. The current edtion was published by Shearsman Press (UK) in 2021.
Sergey Gandlevsky’s 2002 novel Illegible has a double-time focus, centering on the immediate experiences of Lev Krivorotov, a twenty-year-old poet living in Moscow in the 1970s, as well as his retrospective meditations thirty years later after most of his hopes have foundered.
In the surreal and darkly humorous stories of Alta Ifland’s Elegy for a Fabulous World, the narrator recalls an eccentric family and their polyglot friends and neighbors–Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Russians–surviving together in a space where fable, reality, and State-issued lies are impossible to untangle.
Sometimes immigrants must share their experiences with those who are fortunate enough to reside in their countries of birth. Not just to take the load off their shoulders, but to make others aware of the plight of hundreds of millions who leave their countries annually worldwide. I’m one of those immigrants. In this collection of twenty-one stories, I share my own experience and the experience of others like me through the lives of my composite protagonists.
Above Water deals with effects of Nazism on Harry Rosen, a Latvian Jew. Harry has to endure the inferno of the Riga ghetto. <…> Above Water is an important book about life in two totalitarian states–first, German-occupied Latvia, then the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
An exhilaratingly comical, cross-cultural debut novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t brings together an eccentric community from the hills of Santa Barbara, California, and a family of Russians from Chișinău, the capital of Moldova.
This is a book of poetry. The author thinks it is suitable for sad audiences. The book would not make sad readers feel less sad, but it should make them feel understood. In particular, women over the age of 40 who are just not having a good time may well find the collection, in modern parlance, relatable.
A groundbreaking collection of Holocaust literature by the heirs to the greatest evil of our time.
Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word “Jewish”—even in casual conversation—he lowered his voice. This behavior was a natural by-product, he realized, of growing up in the anti-Semitic, post-Holocaust Soviet Union, when “Shush!” was the most frequent word he heard: “Don’t use your Jewish name in public. Don’t speak a word of Yiddish. And don’t cry over your murdered relatives.”
Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, “Farewell, Mama Odessa” is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people—dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black marketeers among them—as they bid farewell to their beloved hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West.
In this captivating memoir, Draitser explores what it means to be a satirist in a country lacking freedom of expression. His experience provides a window into the lives of a generation of artists who were allowed to poke fun and make readers laugh, as long as they toed a narrow, state-approved line.
Historical Musings in 18th Century Ireland. In the midst of Rebellion are legends wrought, and Mogue Trench knows of a tale never told. What better time to relay it than as the rope awaits. The Highwayman Joseph Mac Tíre knows of hardship – at the hands of Redcoats and Republicans alike – so Ireland’s political struggle has less appeal than mentoring an orphan in the ways of the underworld.
Henry Street Arcade is a bilingual collection of poetry by Peter O’Neill, translated into French by the French poet Yan Kouton. It is inspired by a historic shopping arcade in the heart of Dublin city center and evokes for the author the ideas of Walter Benjamin and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire.
A novel about Russian immigrants starting their lives from scratch in Brighton Beach.
“Traditional and radical, secular and holy, the poems in 101 JEWISH POEMS FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM come to us just as we need them.
Loosely based on the biography of the Russian-born writer Alberto Gerchunoff, who became famous for his portrayal of Jewish gauchos living on the Argentinean pampas, the story of Naftali follows the adventures of a twelve-years old boy who escapes the Russia of the 19th century and moves with his family, under the sponsorship of the philanthropist Baron Maurice Hirsch, to a Jewish colony in Argentina, in the hope of finding a worry-free life free of the Russian Tsar and anti-Semitism.
“Meklina’s writing is metamorphic, tangling comedy, irony, tragedy and beauty together”. Alicia Ostriker
Original poetry by Val Vinokur, accompanied by a selection of poems by Osip Mandelstam and Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated from the Russian by Vinokur. Edited by Emily Skillings, “Relative Genitive” is the second book from Poets & Traitors Press, which publishes hybrid books of poetry by a single author-translator.
Otherworldly and mundane collide when a young New York psychologist takes on a charismatic patient who may be delusional or may literally come from the Otherworld of her suppressed childhood nightmares. A spellbinding tale of love, loss and self-discovery set against the magical New York City.
Original poetry by Nina Kossman, accompanied by a selection of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from Russian by Kossman. “The sea is a postcard,” writes Nina Kossman. There is both something elemental in this vision and — iron-tough.”
— Ilya Kaminsky
Действие романа разворачивается в современном Нью-Йорке. Еврейская женщина влюбляется в маляра из Палестины, посланного ее убить.
A collection of moving, often funny vignettes about a childhood spent in the Soviet Union.
“Vivid picture of life behind the Iron Curtain.” —Booklist
“This unique book will serve to promote discussions of freedom.” —School Library Journal
For centuries, poets have looked into the mirror of classical myth to show us the many ways our emotional lives are still reflected in the ancient stories of heroism, hubris, transformation, and loss that myths so eloquently tell. (Oxford University Press, 2001)
“Very original. A monumental work of vibrant imagination.”
–Moris Farhi, Turkish-British author, former vice-president of International PEN
NL Herzenberg is a pen name of Nina Kossman.
Intensely eloquent translations which capture the doom-eager splendor of a superbly gifted poet. – Harold Bloom
“I have no love for life as such; for me it begins to have significance, i.e., to acquire meaning and weight, only when it is transformed, i.e., in art. …”
Alex, an unsinkable optimist, engineer, writer and inventor, scion of a family persecuted by Stalin, is always fighting: from the brutal Chechens at home to the Christian fundamentalists in America. An escapee from the USSR, the most tyrannical regime on Earth, he comes to the US at the age of 30 in search of love, freedom and riches.
Журналист Горгий Пеликанов отправляется в вологодскую глушь, чтобы отыскать легендарный Заповедник, о котором ходят самые невероятные и противоречивые слухи, а в результате… оказывается в затерянном городе – мистическом Вавилоне Русского Севера, исчезнувшем с географических карт сто лет тому назад.
In this dual-edition collection, a first full-length presentation of Mary Jane White’s poetry along with a substantial group of translations from the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva–possibly the most important Russian poet of the 20th Century.
Written in French and translated by the author into English, these poems were generated in a process yielding concurrent shifts to the original.
The first bilingual (English/Russian) sampling of authentic Soviet underground jokes–mostly political, but also ethnic, and at times erotic–published in the United States at the height of the Cold War.
A book of poems in Russian and English. Po Pravuyu Ruku Sna is Nina Kossman’s second book of poems, published by Побережье (The Coast, Russian-American Publishing Co.) in 1996. Her first book of poems, “Pereboi”, was published in Moscow by the Soviet publisher Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1990.
The first section of this enigmatic book is entitled “Kintsugi,” translated by its author, Linda Morales Caballero, as “the beauty of scars.” And that it is; but it is something else as well. The Japanese word (金継ぎ), composed of kin (gold or golden) and tsugi (to repair) refers to the art of repairing or suturing broken objects: ceramic bowls, for example, with gold liquid.