Brothers Anton and Tolik return to bury their mother. But Russia’s war and the activities of the separatists turn this mundane task into a logistical and ideological challenge. The brothers and other village residents have to overcome isolation and a lack of light and water. The only fragile hope for a ceasefire is the so-called harvest truce.

Zhadan skillfully weaves the rhythms of life—birth, death, planting, harvesting—into a reality where war devalues them. What should be sacred becomes insignificant, and the play’s characters must fight the war’s dehumanizing impact.

And so A Harvest Truce is more than just a family story; it is a mirror that reflects the cost of war and the resilience of those who experience it.

In this title, Lesia Ukrainka, using the prism of classical mythology and intertextual practice, draws attention to the problems of colonialism and cultural enslavement, patriarchy and the enslavement of women, as well as the dilemma of the visionary writer who sees the truth along with the consequences, but, like the archetypal Cassandra, is powerless to convey it to his contemporaries and compatriots.

Having received significant critical acclaim upon publication in Ukrainian, this work is also strongly autobiographical and a form of Ukrainka’s implicit self-projection into the new Ukrainian cultural canon. Presented here in a contemporary, sophisticated English translation attuned to psychological nuance, this play is sure to attract the attention of the modern-day reader interested in Ukrainian literature and culture.

Written in diary form, Olena Stiazhkina’s book tells the story of events in and around Donetsk during the Russian invasion and occupation of 2014. In this personal account, she documents the first bloody chapter of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

This diary records events from March 2, 2014, when the first wave of pro-Russian protests swept across eastern Ukraine after Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, to August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees was deliberately destroyed by Russian troops.

Along with her story, Stiazhkina also shares her observations of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, doing so with wry humor, dry wit, and sarcasm.

“My name is Olena Stiazhkina. I was born and raised in Donetsk…
In March 2014, Russians came into Donetsk and Luhansk—or rather, they drove in from Russian oblasts just across the border—dressed up as “protesters.” In April, the Russians were no longer cautious or circumspect; they came in as armed special forces. In August, before the battle of Ilovaisk, Russians came in openly, as regular soldiers.
The catastrophe of occupation unfolded gradually, hour by hour, day by day. That’s probably why, at first, we couldn’t believe it; then we couldn’t stop it. For the entire world, this part of the Russians’ war against Ukraine was invisible, hidden behind the smoke screen of a crudely cobbled-together “suffering people of Donbas.”
We too were invisible: all of us who woke up one fine morning as Ukrainians.”

In Yuliya Musakovska’s newest poetry collection, The God of Freedom, she reveals, facet by facet, the landscape of a turbulent, contemporary Ukraine. Equal parts intimate and expansive, the poems follow the societal struggles of women and their families, the trauma of returning soldiers, and the peoples’ future under the shadow of war and its tumultuous past. Translated by Musakovska and Olena Jennings, The God of Freedom reveals a moving, devastating, and all too necessary glimpse of Ukraine from one of the country’s most celebrated poets. Vibrant, relevant, and masterful, this volume stands out as a must-read work in translation, full of profound insights and captivating eloquence. With cover art by Anastasiia Starko.

Lost in Living presents Halyna Kruk’s unpublished work from the immediate “pre-invasion” years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized. In these “dear poems that don’t pain [her] like those about the war do,” Kruk uses imagery and tone to underscore poetic agency, at times juxtaposing figurative language with a calm, direct voice to bring her poems to life.

Nature cannot be relied on to sustain nor renew, and life is shown to be fundamentally vulnerable. “Calm” is a seductive state of mind capable of cunning, and the speaker is unable to find a place where she can thrive or grow. Still, daily tasks emerge as life-affirming and a welcome constant. It is ultimately a movement toward survival that drives the immediacy and urgency of Kruk’s poetry.

Volume 16 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

This book examines the early poetry (1956–1971) of the Ukrainian/American writer Yuriy Tarnawsky, one of the founders of the New York Group of Ukrainian poets and a unique figure among Ukrainian writers with regard to his experiments with forms. Demonstrating the radical changes that occurred in his poetic style between the 1950s and 1970s, Maria Grazia Bartolini analyzes the relationship between these innovations and the similar shifts taking place in Western poetry and culture during the 1950s and 1960s, when new forms of expression and a new consciousness developed in the interstices between modernism and nascent postmodernism.

The book provides the reader with a selection of unpublished materials from the Yuriy Tarnawsky Papers at the Bakhmeteff Archive of Columbia University.

Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections.

The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.

At thirty-seven, Victoria Amelina was one of Ukraine’s most promising young writers, on the verge of a major international career, when Russia’s full-scale invasion against Ukraine broke out. On hearing the news, Victoria, who was traveling in Egypt with her ten-year-old son, headed home. After dropping him off with her mother in Krakow, she hurried back to her native Lviv, where she joined her fellow citizens as a full-time volunteer, collecting supplies to aid the soldiers on the front lines. On seeing the horrors of war up close, Victoria decided that wasn’t enough, so she signed up with Truth Hounds, a decade-old human rights organization committed to documenting war crimes. She began a new book, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, in which she wrote about the women who had set aside their own lives in order to document war crimes. On June 27th, Victoria was dining in a restaurant near the front lines when a missile struck and Victoria herself became the victim of a war crime.

Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. “This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday,” writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from the ruins of Mariupol, the poem is equal parts chronicle, a document of war crimes, and a sober self-reflection in which the poem’s speaker examines his own engagement with Ukraine as a “democratic-minded” Westerner “determined to develop/ Civil societies around the world.” Not since Byron’s Mazeppa has there been an English-language poem comparably engaged with Ukrainian history, appearing here en face with Nina Murray’s masterly translation into Ukrainian.

Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy and became a shochet (kosher slaughter) as a young man, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information. Goldenshteyn’s adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire.

Until now, only a small circle of Yiddish-speaking scholars had access to this extremely significant primary source. This translation is a game-changer, making the treasure trove of information contained in these pages accessible to academics and ordinary readers alike. Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli, and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.