Reading Ukraine: Fiction & Nonfiction
History, memoir and fiction that explore the past, present and future of an embattled land and people, their gradual, halting emergence of Ukrainian national identity and solidarity, and the deep roots of the current conflict in Ukraine.
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Everything Is Illuminated
Hilarious, energetic, and profoundly touching, Foer's debut novel follows a young writer as he travels to Ukraine, where he embarks on a quest to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and discovers an unexpected past that will resonate far into the future.
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The Nose & Other Stories
These stories showcase Ukraine-born Nikolai Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own.
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Death and the Penguin
Hired to write obituaries of Kiev VIPs to be kept on file, Ukranian writer Viktor, who owns a penguin Misha, discovers he is writing death warrants when the VIPs die with regularity and realizes someone is writing his own obituary.
Format: eBook
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Oksana, Behave!
Enduring a hand-to-mouth existence after emigrating from Ukraine to Florida, trouble-prone Oksana romanticizes memories of her early life in Russia before a visit to her grandmother helps her discover how to love life without doing harm.
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Something Unbelievable
An overwhelmed new mom asks to hear her grandmother's story of her family's desperate escape from the Nazis, discovering unexpected parallels to her own life in America.
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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Putting aside a lifetime of rivalry when they learn that their recently widowed father is planning to remarry, sisters Vera and Nadezhda find themselves outmaneuvered by their father's scheming fiancée amidst a hurricane, family secrets, and their father's obsession with tractor history.
Format: Book
Availability: No Longer Available
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I Will Die in A Foreign Land
As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during the tumultuous and violent Ukrainian Revolution, in a harrowing novel featuring a chorus of voices revealing a turbulent Slavic history.
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Good Citizens Need Not Fear
A droll, wondrous and heartbreaking collection of interconnected short stories set in and around an apartment building in Ukraine before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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Mother Country
Struggling with demeaning work and racism in her Brooklyn community, Ukrainian immigrant Nadia takes matters into her own hands when the daughter she unwillingly left behind is denied life-saving medicine.
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Dog Park
As Ukrainian emigre Olenka sits on a bench in a Helskinki dog park she is joined by the woman whose life she ruined. Has she reappeared in Olenka's life for revenge?
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