Two conjoined babies are born at the intersection of two social worldviews. The girls are named Faith and Hope. After spending their childhood in a foster home and obtaining a basic education, they come to realise that they are different from other people in many respects. The problems of their upbringing are only made worse by the constant humiliations they suffer at the hands of society.Eventually, fortune smiles on them, by seemingly opening up the door to happiness: a separation surgery t...

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...

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 s...

Bera and Cucumber is a series of eight linked short stories. The links between them are manifold and include emigration to Israel and elsewhere, the Old Testament, and the sea. However, by far the main connection is the cosmopolitan city of Odesa, specifically the Jewish quarter, with its many and varied inhabitants and their professions, both legal and illicit. There are also many references to the famous landmarks of the city, as well as its trams, shops and suburbs.

The language of these s...

One night in 1974, Archana, her brother's wife and a family friend who happens to be staying the night at their house, were taken hostage by the police, because Archana's younger brother, Saumen, was a member of a terrorist underground movement which is at war with the police and preparing for armed insurrection. When Archana's brother is caught, the three women are sent to prison indefinitely, along with him, on trumped-up charges. Her ordeal in the torture chamber of the Kolkota police leav...

The Hemingway Game is the first novel from Russian playwright and performer of his own plays, Evgeny Grishkovets. The Hemingway Game is an urban romance which depicts the life of a shirt over the course of one day (worn in the morning and taken off late at night); revealing a lot about the main character, who subsequently moved to Moscow some time ago. He, just like all of us, wakes up in the morning, goes to work, meets his friends and has his daily routine; that is until love changes everyt...

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.

Solar Plexus is a passionate family saga in four parts, set against the backdrop of Azerbaijan's rapidly-changing capital, Baku, as the country struggles with the transition into a post-Soviet world. Spanning three generations and stretching from the 1940s to the 1990s, Solar Plexus tells the tale of a group of friends who grew up around the same courtyard in Baku. Each section is told from a different perspective, embedded into the canvas of the shifting turmoil of those decades: from the G...

Elena Dolgopyat was born and raised in the USSR, trained as a computer programmer in a Soviet military facility, and retrained as a cinematographer post-Perestroika. Fusing her diverse experiences with her own sensitivities and preoccupations, and weaving throughout a colourful thread of magic realism, she has produced an unsettling group of fifteen stories all concerned in some way with the theme of estrangement. Elena herself, in an interview given at the time of the book’s launch, said, ...

The Witch of Konotop (written in 1833 and published in 1836–37) is a beloved, classic Ukrainian comic novella that is little known outside of Ukraine. Part of the reason for this has been the difficulty in translating its complex stylistic levels that range from archaic Old Church Slavonic to colorful, colloquial Ukrainian. It shares several stylistic similarities to Mykola Hohol’s (aka Nikolai Gogol’s) Ukrainian horror tales in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1833). These include a fo...