In these two novellas, Volodymyr Dibrova - one of the best prose writers in Ukraine today - tells the story of how the Soviet system was sustained by individuals who never truly chose to support it but simply lacked the courage to oppose it. Peltse portrays the formation of an average apparatchik. Both funny and alarming, the novella provides an incisive psychological portrait of an individual trapped in a system he simultaneously dislikes and depends on for survival. Pentameron tells the story of one day in the life of five colleagues working in a Soviet research institute. Each is...

Winner, 1998 PEN Center USA West Award for Translation
Josef Hirsal's experimental novel is a Dada-like romp through the life of a young man born into a Bohemian peasant family. Told in five parts, "A Bohemian Youth" begins with a word to the wise, moves on to the text, continues with notes and with notes to the note, and ends with a note on the notes to the notes.
More than just a tongue-in-cheek parody of a literary memoir, "A Bohemian Youth" is a glimpse of the First Czechoslovak Republic as seen through the eyes of a young peasant from the provinces. Abounding in intimate...

One of the best-known novels by prolific Romanian avant-garde writer Gelu Naum, Zenobia is the evocation of the singular quest of a Surrealist knight-errant who strives to be true to the gentle demands of his lady in a landscape of snares, desolation, incipient madness, and material poverty magically interrupted by moments of extreme beauty.
His wife, artist Lyggia Naum, was the inspiration for the title character. In this 1985 masterpiece, penned in the twilight of the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, love, in all its intimate, carnal communion, lights the path through...

Popov's short stories move from the village prose genre into the territory of the grotesque via the stark reality of late Soviet life. In a landscape peopled by sympathetic yet stunned characters caught between the harsh routine of everyday existence and the trappings of the modern world, these men and women resort to vodka and to tall tales, and to physical and verbal abuse, to dull the pain of the dehumanizing Soviet regime that is their lot.

The novella and two short stories that make up this volume were written at three different periods in Makanin's life, yet they are united by their narrative and stylistic invention, their range of human emotion, and the profound humanity of their prose. Though banished and suppressed in the Brezhnev era, Makanin is now recognized as one of Russia's leading writers.
In his celebrated short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," two Russian soldiers take a Chechen prisoner during the war, and as events unfold, Makanin reveals the casual brutality of the war but also the secret truths of the...

The first collection of stories by the young Slovenian writer Andrej Blatnik to appear in English, Skinswaps represents a new ethos in the literature of post-communist Eastern Europe. Unconcerned with the ponderous legacy of communism and the explicit struggle between the personal and the political, Blatnik's stories utilize a range of narrative perspectives from the dramatically oblique, the formally experimental, and the comically absurd to the poignantly realistic to cast unexpected light on universal conflicts of identity and fate. Blatnik's detached and impersonal yet eerily compelling...

The poems in "Angel Riding a Beast" are the stunning expression of the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu's years in America. The sadness and paradoxes of exile and the clarity of a cross-cultural awareness become for Ursu the psychological and descriptive framework for poems infused with the emotion and images of erotic longing and spiritual loneliness. The combination of elegy and wit in the poems of Ovid, the poet of exile with whom Ursu claims kinship, is evident in her poetry as well. Always conscious of both her new American freedom and the remorselessness of time and death, Ursu explores the...

The disquieting novel How to Quiet a Vampire is a rumination on terror and intellect in the tradition of Joseph Heller and George Steiner. Published to acclaim in 1977, Pekic's novel of ideas follows Konrad Rutkowski, professor of medieval history and former Gestapo officer, as he returns to the scene of his war crimes determined to renounce, or perhaps justify, his Nazi past. In a series of letters, Rutkowski lays out his ambivalent reactions to war and violence, connecting his own swirling ideas to those of the major figures of European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes,...

This collection features Svetlana Vasilenko's novel "Little Fool, " nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. Rich in folklore, legend, and history, the story follows the transformation of Ganna, a girl from the Volga shores, into a modern-day Madonna. Also included are the novella "Shamara" and several short stories, including the acclaimed "Going After Goat Antelopes."

This collection features Svetlana Vasilenko's novel "Little Fool, " nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. Rich in folklore, legend, and history, the story follows the transformation of Ganna, a girl from the Volga shores, into a modern-day Madonna. Also included are the novella "Shamara" and several short stories, including the acclaimed "Going After Goat Antelopes."