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Ukrainian scientists have reproduced Neanderthal DNA. One of the representatives of this species, Stepan Vovk, grows up in a secret institute disguised as a garage. He is released form the institute after reaching adulthood. Due to the lack of life experience and mental peculiarities, the Neanderthal constantly finds himself in strange situations. He looks at the local homo sapiens through the eyes of a somewhat naive outsider. The story is a tragicomedy about our contemporary world.
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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John Ford's tragedy, first printed in 1633, is the first major English play to take as its theme a subject still rarely handled: fulfilled incest between brother and sister. This Revels Plays edition is a scholarly, modern-spelling edition of one of the most studied and performed of all plays of the period. White's critical introduction explores the textual and theatrical histories of the play, exploring closely its relationship to the particular stage and audience for which it was written. This Revels edition allows the modern reader to become, in Ford's words, an 'actor that but reads'.
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What do newspapers, bread, cosmic changes, and a uterus lining have in common?A Drip. A Drop. A Deluge: A Period Tragicomedy takes us on a journey through theeyes (and wombs) of six different women and how they – and the people aroundthem – experience their monthly cycles.Menstruation is an intimately personal yet shared experience that can sometimesbe hard to talk about candidly, but it’s time to put menstruating bodies at the heartof the conversation. Inspired by true stories from Asian women, this beautifullyillustrated short comic by Andeasyand shows the lived experiences of unique,individual bodies, and brings to light the commonly undiscussed symptoms andtrepidations of periods – heavy, regular, or nonexistent.
Reprising the characters from his 2017 novel La chaleur des mammifères a few years later, Biz here casts a sociological look on academia, in the time of trigger warnings, snowflakes and cancel culture. With humour, he depicts the fear that grips those who are supposed to educate but who grovel to preserve what they have acquired, namely a job, and some power. The result is the portrait of a milieu that no longer knows what it stands for... Filled with references to brilliant writer of ill repute Louis-Ferdinand Céline, this tragicomedy raises the question of teaching at a time when everyone’s sensibilities mustn’t be offended and when ignorance is bliss, always preferable to knowledge that hurts.
Vadi’s fantasy novel weaves a thrilling version of tumultuous years in Estonian history. When the Soviet Union occupied the Republic of Estonia in 1940, authorities deported the Estonian president Konstantin Päts and his family to Russia. When war broke out between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, he was arrested and imprisoned in various mental hospitals until his death in 1956. In Vadi’s novel, four men who have assumed false identities and are masquerading as a folk-dance troupe set out to free the president from the Kazan Asylum. Alas, as their journey commences, they don’t even know how to dance. Stitched into their folk costumes are said to be the secret codes the president needs to access his assets. One of the briefcases they were given contains a book on folk dancing. Needless to say, not all goes according to plan. Vadi originally wrote the story as a play that was staged in 2009, and later reworked it as a film script. The Ballet Master is indeed cinematically dynamic and theatrically multilayered, reminiscent of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The grotesque comedy partly centers around the president, who was a great historical figure, and otherwise follows the rescue squad made up of a fi re fighter and three potters: four entirely ordinary men who are meant to alter the course of history. The imposters board a train to Moscow from Tallinn and are forced to perform an improvised dance repertoire that very same evening in the dining car. The comical-yet-calculated creativity and mesmerizing quality of the men’s movements is detailed from their very first leaps – be it hopping on one foot with their arms crossed and trying to make the others lose their balance while “La Marseillaise” is played, or a dance called “Walk When the Devil’s on Your Heels”, which was they learned from a Moscow street urchin named Seryozha to help them survive in war or a metropolis. Peppered with ample references to Russian literary classics and fairy tales, the four men’s adventure through Russia is akin to an unpredictable Russian anecdote. The Ballet Master’s bizarre cast of semi-folkloric characters is colorful, including humans and animals alike. That said, deeper undertones are not absent at any point in the story. The characters’ fates, romances that flourish along the way, and betrayal that is committed are written with witty and concerned warmth from start to finish. Although they do not succeed in freeing the president, the magical tragicomedy (or black comedy) still has a happy ending in store for the dance troupe.
