Jesus’ Cat is the first book by this young prose writer. The stories involved in this collection reveal, on the one hand, a unique writing style, and on the other, an original perspective on the world and people. This combination allows characters to develop in Grig’s creative space that helps readers discover another invisible side of life.

This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the “Armenian Literature in Translation” Pro...

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.

In this new translation, western readers have a chance to discover why Ptushkina's work holds such wide appeal in the Russian theatre.Main description: Nadezhda Ptushkina's plays reflect her keen interest in constructing multidimensional characters that reflect the myriad ways people are affected by today's turbulent world. Often writing strong female roles, she does not shy away from exploring the sometimes tragic implications that lie behind her comical, almost farcical scenes. Ptushkina qu...

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...

"It would be hard to imagine Russian poetry in the last half century without Lydia Grigorieva," writeseminent Russian poet and critic Konstantin Kedrov. Grigorieva is a uniquely individual voice, bucking the trends of modernist poetry to create her own distinctive and beguiling body of poetry.Her work draws on her own remarkable life to create startlingly arresting images and metaphors, full of beauty and power, from her series that emerged from her Arctic childhood, to the troubles that bese...

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...

Yuri Vynnychuk is a master storyteller and satirist, who emerged from the Western Ukrainian underground in Soviet times to become one of Ukraine's most prolific and most prominent writers of today. He is a chameleon who can adapt his narrative voice in a variety of ways and whose style at times is reminiscent of Borges. A master of the short story, he exhibits a great range from exquisite lyrical-philosophical works such as his masterpiece "An Embroidered World," written in the mode of magica...

"Girls, be good" is an omnibus novel that consists of twenty short stories connected by a single framing narrative: just after the fall of the Berlin wall, foreign investors feel good about the investment climate in Eastern Europe and decide to open a huge toy factory in ex-Yugoslavia, where they are going to produce a hit range of toys designed for girls: small, plush lemurs called Aya, that will be sold all over the world. Before long, though, their optimism starts to feel out of place - th...

Is it possible to cultivate fundamental human values if you live in a totalitarian state? A teacher who has organised the school theatre sets out to prove that it is. Whilst the pupils rehearse Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies under her ever-vigilant eye, Soviet life begins to make its brutal adjustments. This story can be called a book about love, the tough kind of love that gets you through life and death.

Little Zinnobers is especially fascinating for British readers as we see Shakespea...