Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584) is not only the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz, he is also one of the great figures of the European Renaissance. Over the space of his rather brief life, he excelled in every literary genre he attempted: secular lyric poetry and religious hymns, drama, pithy satires in the vein of Martial, and translations from both the Bible and classical literature. While being the first major voice to shape the modern idiom of Polish, he also wrote in Latin, for w...

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...

Superb storytelling and sound research offer a fun and fascinating glimpse into the Fruit of the Spirit described in Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The timeless truths of Orthodoxy permeate our everyday lives each and every moment. The author submitted these twelve articles to The Word, the periodical of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, and the magazine published five of his ess...

Igor krijgt werk aangeboden op een geheime afdeling van de FSB, die zich bezighoudt met het elimineren van verdachte burgers. De slachtoffers, schijnbaar lukraak uitgekozen, worden eerst verhoord en daarna vermoord. Igor vraagt zich af wat ze misdaan hebben.

In De afdeling wordt een luguber, pessimistisch beeld geschetst van het Rusland in het tweede decennium van deze eeuw. Er is sprake van gewenning aan absurd geweld, normalisering van zinloze wreedheid en geestelijke afstomping bij degenen...

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...

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...

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...

A brilliant satirist, Ostap Vyshnia (1889-1956) sent up the shortcomings of Soviet life and bureaucracy in the 1920s. He was famous in Ukraine almost exclusively for his feuilletons, and achieved enormous popularity in this genre in the 1920s, especially among the peasant population. Called by many the father of contemporary Ukrainian satire, he became the most-read author after Taras Shevchenko. Many village and town cooperatives, schools and farms were spontaneously named in his honour. Ove...

This book features people from one of the most closed countries of today's world, where the passage of time resembles the passage of a caravan through the waterless desert. This world has been recreated by a true-born son of that mysterious country, a Turkmen who, at the will of fate, has now been living for a quarter of a century in snowy Scandinavia. Is that not why two different worlds come together in Ryazan horseradish and Tula gingerbread, to come apart in Love in Lilac, in which a stu...