Search results for ""Author Serhiy Zhadan""

An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation “This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz Wright or Charles Bukowski, Zhadan’s no-nonsense verses are sure to strike more than a few nerves.”—World Literature Today “A startling collection of verse.”—Askold Melnyczuk, Times Literary Supplement “Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully,” reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world‑renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where “every year there’s less and less air.” Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan’s poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people “will never let it be / like it was before.”

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In Serhiy Zhadan's tragicomedy A Harvest Truce, brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their mother. Isolated without power or running water on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, the brothers' best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease firethe harvest truce.

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The easiest thing to do in times of war is to hate others. The hardest thing is to reach an understanding. Even with your own people. But we must try, otherwise the war will never end. And to reach an understanding, you need to talk. With anyone, in any way and about anything. The main thing is not to lose humanity, that is, love and attention.

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One day you wake up and see a fire outside your window. You didn't start it. But you will have to put it out. January 2015. Donbass. Pasha, a school teacher, watches the front line steadily approaching his home. It so happens that he is forced to cross the line. And then to return back. And to do this, he needs to decide which side his home is on.

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Sixty poems about memory born of love and about the fire that leaves tenderness. Sixty attempts to outline the light and tell about the air above the city. Sixty fragments of other people's conversations, sixty voices that fill the spring twilight. "List of Ships" is a list of those who have left, but who cannot be forgotten.

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"The Templars" - 39 poems about the war that no one has declared, about the pain that no one can cope with, about the love that no one can refuse, and the hope on which everything is based.

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A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan “Among Ukraine’s most distinguished writers. . . . Zhadan has borne expert witness to Russia’s fire-blasted impingement on his country since the 2014 invasion of Crimea.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, “Best Poetry of 2023” Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with extinction. Young lovers, marginalized outsiders, and ordinary citizens pulse with life in a composite portrait of a people newly unified by extremity. Even in the midst of enemy fire, Zhadan’s lyrical monuments beat with a subterranean thrum of hope. With a foreword by the poet Ilya Kaminsky, this selection of Zhadan’s poetry, forged entirely in wartime, is an homage to the Ukrainian people, a forceful reckoning with the violence of the past and present, and an act of artistic imagination that breaks with trauma and charts a new future for Ukraine.

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A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan is the fifth volume in Lost Horse Press’s Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. In these poems, the poet focuses on daily life during the Russo-Ukrainian war, rendering intimate portraits of the country’s residents as they respond to crisis. Zhadan revives and revises the role of the nineteenth-century Romantic bard, one who portrays his community with clarity, preserving its most precious aspects and darkest nuances. The poems investigate questions of home, exile, solitude, love, and religious faith, making vivid the experiences of noncombatants, refugees, soldiers, and veterans. This collection will be of interest to those who study how poetry observes and mirrors the shifts within a country during wartime, and it offers solace as well.

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A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation’s post-independence years “Serhiy Zhadan is one of the most important creators of European culture at work today. His novels, poems, and songs touch millions.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny “One of the most astounding novels to come out of modern Ukraine. Mesopotamia is seductive, twisted, brilliant, and fierce.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure and Absurdistan This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home. A leader among Ukrainian post‑independence authors, Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse. His novel provides an extraordinary depiction of the lives of working-class Ukrainians struggling against an implacable fate: the road forward seems blocked at every turn by demagogic forces and remnants of the Russian past. Zhadan’s nine interconnected stories and accompanying poems are set in a city both representative and unusual, and his characters are simultaneously familiar and strange. Following a kind of magical-realist logic, his stories expose the grit and burden of stalled lives, the universal desire for intimacy, and a wistful realization of the off-kilter and even perverse nature of love.

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A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine Chosen as one of “Six Books to Read for Context on Ukraine” by the New York Times Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the “20 Best Books of 2021” “Powerful . . . For those who want a glimpse of what life will be like in Ukraine for years to come, The Orphanage offers a frightening glimpse.”—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe’s most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home. Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.

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From Ukraine’s leading writer-activist comes an intimate account of resistance and survival in the earliest months of the Russian-Ukrainian war “A vivid, in-the-trenches report from a Ukrainian city and its ‘injured, yet unbreakable’ citizens.”—Kirkus Reviews When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Serhiy Zhadan took to social media to coordinate a network of resistance workers and send messages of courage to his fellow Ukrainians. What began as a local organizing effort exploded onto the international stage as readers around the globe looked to Zhadan as a key eyewitness documenting Russian atrocities. In this powerful record of the war’s harrowing first four months, Zhadan works day and night in Kharkiv to evacuate children and the elderly from suburbs that have come under fire. He sends lists of life-saving medications to the West in the hopes of procuring them for civilians, coordinates food deliveries, collects money for military equipment, and organizes concerts. He shares photographs of the open sky—grateful for every pause in the shelling—and captures images of beloved institutions reduced to rubble. We’ll restore everything. We’ll rebuild everything, he writes. As the days pass, the city empties. Friends are killed. And when images of the Bucha massacre are released, Zhadan’s own voice falters: I’m speechless. Hang in there, my friends. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up one day closer to our victory. An intimate work of witness literature, this book is at once the testimony of one man entering a new reality and the story of a society fighting for the right to exist.

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