Provided with a remarkable collection, Mercure de France follows an exacting editorial policy: French and foreign literature, poetry, history, anthologies... Awarded many times, the publishing house is associated with prestigious names: Romain Gary, Colette, Ionesco , André Gide, André du Bouchet, Henri Michaux, Adonis, Yves Bonnefoy, Andréï Makine, Gilles Leroy, Anne Serre, Gwenaëlle Aubry, Julian Barnes...
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A publisher dedicated to promote the works by Cambodian female authors. Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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Andrukhovych’s hero, rock musician Joseph Rotsky, supported the revolution in his home country by being a "barricade pianist". Forced into exile, he earns his living playing salon music. In a Swiss hotel he is forced to perform for his country’s dictator. He throws an egg at him, accidentally killing him. After his release from prison, Rotsky retreats to the Carpathian Mountains, where he is soon found by secret service agents and other sinister characters who are out to get him. His escape takes him as far as Greece – with his raven Edgar and his lover Animé as his faithful companions. He ends up on a prison island on the prime meridian, where he hosts his own radio programme: "Radio Night" – his own label that allows him to broadcast music, poetry and good stories into a darkening world. Yurii Andrukhovych’s long awaited new novel, a revolutionary saga, biographical burlesque and agent thriller set against the backdrop of the immediate present – Andrukhovych pulls out all the artistic stops to counter the fears and real threats with the sovereignty of imagination. Radio Night received great acclaim from readers and critics alike.
Serhiy Zhadan's new book, "Vyshyvanyi. The King of Ukraine", is a story that is always relevant, especially nowadays. It is a story of love for Ukraine. Austrian Archduke Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen, known as Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, played a prominent role in the Ukrainian national liberation movement. Zhadan speaks about the project: "The figure of Vyshyvany is non-trivial, interesting, and deserves all kinds of mentions and study. The coming of Vyshivany to Ukrainianness and acceptance of his identity is not a fictional story. It is interesting to learn how many people are discovering Ukraine, Ukrainian history, Ukrainian culture, and the Ukrainian language." The book has already found its supporters and even received an award in the "Best Book Design 2020" competition, held by the "Book Arsenal" International Festival in cooperation with the Goethe Institute in Ukraine. This award is fully justified: the creative tandem of Zhuk&Kelm artistic talent has created a real gem. Designer Nadiya Kelm wrote about the work: "Vyshyvany got his nickname from Ukrainian soldiers because he liked to dress up in embroidered clothes. This was the starting point for the visual concept of the book. We took a very geometric embroidery scheme, which grows with each section, revealing more and more of the portrait of the Vyshyvanyi. The perforated pages allude to the Ukrainian vytynanka (paper cut ornament)".
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...One day, you wake up and see the fire burning outside your window. You didn't start it. But you the one who will have to put it out......January 2015. Donbas. Pasha, a teacher at one of the schools, watches as the front line steadily approaches his home. It happens that he is forced to cross this line. To return later. And to return he needs to decide whose side his house is on...
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Brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their recently deceased mother. An otherwise natural ritual unfolds under extraordinary circumstances: their house is on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Isolated without power or running water, the brothers’ best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease-fire - the harvest truce. But such hopes are swiftly dashed, as it becomes apparent that the conflagration of war will not abate. Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce stages a tragicomedy in which the commonplace experiences of death, birth, and the cycles of life marked by the practices of growing and harvesting food are rendered futile and farcical in the wake of the indifferent juggernaut of war.
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A portrait of a Ukrainian woman more often shows her being silent than speaking. However, without this silence there would be no voice that sounds in this collection. The voice that defends the right to speak sincerely about acute grief, generational traumas, the courage of love, and disappointment with emptiness behind masks. Since speaking out is the only way to remain oneself and to be the voice of hundreds speechless sisters.
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A drunk judge kills a young woman in a car accident and escapes punishment without much effort. But the woman's husband is not one of those who can be bribed to stay silent or intimidated into oblivion. He would rather lose everything but find out the name of the culprit. A psychological thriller about Ukraine before the war, where bribes measured the value of human life, and murderers stood in the front rows at church services. But why is Puccini able to burn the souls of both antagonists with the look of Madame Butterfly? And is the division between good and evil so clear-cut in this novel? The reader will not find the answer to the last question until the end.
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"Antenna" is a collection of 80 new poems written by the author over the past two years. They represent 80 attempts to catch air vibrations, to catch the flow of invisible radio waves in space, to feel to the touch of the time in which we live, breathe, and speak. Time, every trace of which leaves a burn—a time when private diary entries could be war chronicles and Bible stories or the morning news. Sensual and deep.
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Kateryna Kalytko's new book is a long story written in one breath. It is a book about personal boundaries that one will recognize and defend as well as the boundaries will always protect him. This story is about the ability to live with one's scars, being an orphan, remembering the metallic smell of weapons at night, and the air in which time is dissolved. This is the story about the taste of your own words that burn your mouth when you taste their true meaning.
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It’s possible not to know what a “mondegreen” is, but it’s unlikely that one can completely defend against it. He who is blessed to live is also doomed to make mistakes. For example, to perceive select sayings in a distorted manner, and consequently - to misinterpret them, sometimes to absurdity. But is it possible, having moved as an adult from the Russian-speaking Donetsk to the hardly Ukrainian-speaking Kyiv, to quickly learn the Ukrainian language? Yes, possible. What’s more: one can even be someone like Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a Russian-speaking writer of significant age and renown, and then, having ended up in Kyiv, master Ukrainian to such a degree so as to write an amazing novel in it. In particular, a novel about the immersion of a Russian-speaking migrant into the joyous and sorrowful element of the Ukrainian language. And also, a novel about his not wanting to remain a passive object of Russia’s “protection”. But above all, it’s a novel about how poorly the different parts of our multilingual Ukraine heard each other, thus turning one another into an utter “mondegreen”. Is there still a chance to solve this misunderstanding? Unknown. But first we have to try, at the very least, to listen carefully to one another: maybe then we’ll manage to decipher all this distorted noise.
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Sixty poems about memory born of love, and about fire that leaves tenderness in its wake. Sixty attempts to outline light and to tell of the air above the city. Sixty excerpts of other people’s conversations, sixty voices that fill the twilight in spring. “The List of Ships” is a list of those who had left, but whom we cannot forget. A list of names that accompany you throughout all your life. A list of cities where you are always expected and welcomed. Perhaps, the most intimate book of the author.
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"Lovers of Justice" is a paranormal novel in which several biographies are combined into an artistic whole using the author's signature compositional and stylistic skills. They cry out to become an eight-and-a-half-episode TV saga. Family and political murders, rapes and robberies, depravity of minors and the mysterious separation of the head, ideological betrayals and betrayals for the sake of an idea, are assigned to various devils of the soul and are not always fair, but often terrible punishments. What else is needed for the reader to feel good and realize with pleasure his moral superiority over the unfortunate lovers of capricious Justice?
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In the adventure novel "Carbide," events unfold during the hot and troublesome summer of 2015 when a group of enthusiasts decides to build a Fountain of Unity with Europe in the small fictional town called the Bears. Why do they need a fountain, why are they perfect criminals, and how much can you buy a human kidney for in Ukraine - the author writes about all this business with humor and selective pessimism. The book features a plum tincture, fishermen, a cemetary worker, a seductive and lustful woman, several murderers, a corrupt mayor, and a brilliant idea. It also features river Tysa, and some despair.
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“Who are you?” hears young Tymofyi from Feliks, his friend and foe, torturer and mentor, a man shell-shocked by a faraway war. “Who am I?” asks himself the almost-adult, autobiographical Tymofyi at the end of the novel. The road from the first question to the second is inevitable for any coming of age novel. In the case of Artem Chekh - coming of age in the shadow of repulsive experiences from a foreign war, which suddenly turns out to be only the mind and body’s training in preparation of a war of our own, though we won't find it in this novel. However, we are likely to find all those childish and youthful initiations, through which we all had to fight on our path towards adult lives that turn out to be unlike anything we had imagined.
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Taras Prokhasko wrote a series of sketches about the future that was a long time ago, and about everything that already is, but not knowing how long it will be. In particular, about such simple things as balconies and curtains, light and stones, swings and toilets, walking through the city and shooting a film in the Carpathian mountains, the formula of happiness and the influence factor, Babinton (mispronunciation of badminton) and Selbsferstendlich, and other such things. He also writes about the fact that you need to sleep carefully, eat breakfast - in your own way, and look - by shifting the vision. Yes, but that's not the main point. Because the main point here is the type of story in which reflections become elements of the plot and appear not as written after the fact, but spoken at the moment of their birth. And therefore, these are not sketches or essays, but stories in the strictest sense of the word.
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District D is a collection of stories united through a common time period and location, from which gradually emerges a portrait of the author against the backdrop of “other shores,” on which his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood passed. The book paints a self-critical portrait of the author in which one can discern the features of husbandry and cosmopolitanism, pettiness and magnanimity, and much else. Simultaneously, it paints a group portrait of a few dozen more or less registered residents of the aforementioned Cherkasy district with their more or less successful attempts at surviving the unexpected transition from post-soviet to newly independent Ukraine. According to the author, District D served as therapy for his own traumatic experiences because he wrote it while serving in the war: “I would write it out of me and would feel better; I escaped from that war and those experiences into writing.”
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"Lexicon of Intimate Cities" is the biggest novel of Yuriy Andruhovych so far. A tireless traveler across Ukraine, Europe, and America, the author tells us 111 stories about 111 cities with which he was lucky enough to experience happy and not so happy, but always intimate, in the broadest sense of the word, moments.Arranged in the alphabetical order according to the geographical names of the locations, these diverse texts – from essays and short stories to prose poems together form an autobiographical atlas of the writer's world. In addition, each "lexical" adventure is clearly inscribed in time space coordinates, which allows the reader to follow the author in 111 private-historical leaps from the mid-60s of the last century to the present day.It is hardly worth expecting objective characteristics of Kyiv and Lviv, Moscow and Warsaw, New York and Yenakiyiv from this atlas, this extremely subjective "manual of geopoetics and cosmopolitics". But you can definitely find more artistically important things in it: the atmosphere, mood, images, smells and tastes of favorite cities and places, as they were imprinted in the author's memory. As well as momentary observations and deeper reflections, lyricism and sadness, irony and sarcasm - that is, everything that makes our communication with the world to resemble true intimacy.
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And so they return from the war and notice that the war exists only in their reality. And that now they will have to bear responcibility for that war. The space between their responsibility and their war is filled with fierceness and anger, but also faith and perseverance. And only the one who remembers where it all started can overcome this chasm. And most importantly, he knows how everything should end."The Templars" is a collection of 39 poems about the war that no one declared, about the pain that no one can cope with, about the love that no one can refuse, and the hope on which everything rests.Serhiy ZhadanI was honored to illustrate Serhiy Zhadan's new book. In a sense, we all live in the Age of Desire. Serhiy today is perhaps the most important figure of the new Ukrainian literature. I also perceive him as a voice of reason and a role model of the honest position of a writer in our tattered time in our already self-reborn country. I decided not to literally illustrate specific texts, but to create a kind of suite based on my own works from different years, that resonate with Serhiy's poetry. Alexander Roitburd
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"Sweet Life" is a collection of short stories united by mood and plot spirals. In "Twenty-Five Days" Luka sits in the chair of a hairdresser in the immigrant quarter of Berlin. They speak different languages, and the only way to understand each other is through gestures and touches. Their the inner language guides them until the twenty-fifth day arrives. In "Cairo Express", David travels on a transcontinental train and carries a secret cargo to the final station. However, the comfort of this journey is in danger. In "The Write-off", the girl receives an urgent task. "After all, who else could be entrusted with this matter," she thinks after hearing the order.To fulfill it, she goes to meet with Terakotov. Thirteen stories full of internal dramas, experiences, passion, rage, adoration. The stories are full of flavors and sensory perceptions - sweet and not only. They are cinematic: while reading, you will feel the space physically - fabrics, colors, shades, surfaces. This book is full of mystery and playfulness, anxiety, but also airy lightness. "Sweet Life" invites you to play, to travel by planes and trains, rooms and houses, metropolises and continents. Calls for a journey through the boundless, unfathomable cosmos of human nature. Trust the heroes - they will become your guides and show the way in the intricate labyrinth of stories.
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Zwischen »stillen Tagen« und »kalten Tagen« stimmt Robert Schindel in Nervös der Meridian seine »Verlustlieder« und andere Gesänge an, in denen es oft um die Liebe geht, um das Unterwegssein und um das langsame Vergehen der Zeit. Die elegischen und balladesken Gedichte erzählen von Politischem und Privatem, von der Sehnsucht nach besseren Welten und verdeutlichen – einmal mehr –, daß ihr Autor ein Meister der Lyrik ist, ein sprachmächtiger Rebell. Robert Schindel, dessen Werk mit dem Erich-Fried-Preis (1993) und dem Eduard-Mörike-Preis (2000) ausgezeichnet wurde, ist ein Dichter in der Tradition von Heine, Brecht und Celan. Mit Nervös der Meridian ist ihm ein reifer, hellsichtig-weiser Band geglückt – ein neuer Schindel.
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Paul Celan wurde am 23. November 1920 als Paul Antschel als einziger Sohn deutschsprachiger, jüdischer Eltern im damals rumänischen Czernowitz geboren. Nach dem Abitur 1938 begann er ein Medizinstudium in Tours/Frankreich, kehrte jedoch ein Jahr später nach Rumänien, zurück, um dort Romanistik zu studieren. 1942 wurden Celans Eltern deportiert. Im Herbst desselben Jahres starb sein Vater in einem Lager an Typhus, seine Mutter wurde erschossen. Von 1942 bis 1944 musste Celan in verschiedenen rumänischen Arbeitslagern Zwangsarbeit leisten. Von 1945 bis 1947 arbeitete er als Lektor und Übersetzer in Bukarest, erste Gedichte wurden publiziert. Im Juli 1948 zog er nach Paris, wo er bis zum seinem Tod lebte. Im selben Jahr begegnete Celan Ingeborg Bachmann. Dass Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan Ende der vierziger Jahre und Anfang der fünfziger Jahre ein Liebesverhältnis verband, das im Oktober 1957 bis Mai 1958 wieder aufgenommen wurde, wird durch den posthum veröffentlichten Briefwechsel Herzzeit zwischen den beiden bestätigt. Im November 1951 lernte Celan in Paris die Künstlerin Gisèle de Lestrange kennen, die er ein Jahr später heiratete. 1955 kam ihr gemeinsamer Sohn Eric zur Welt. Im Frühjahr 1970 nahm sich Celan in der Seine das Leben.
