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Literature: history & criticism2021Taras Shevchenko. New Perspectives
by Volodymyr Dibrova
Each chapter is a careful and unhurried reading of one of Shevchenko's famous works with a profound and witty commentary by Volodymyr Dibrova. The author is a translator, literary critic, and lecturer at Harvard University and teaches Ukrainian language and literature to students from all over the world. In this collection of essays, avoiding simplification and total idealization, he "translates" some realities, contexts and reflects on the sources of the writer's poetic influence. This book is aimed at allowing you to look at the famous texts "with a fresh eye", and after rereading them, to find your own Shevchenko and to better understand yourself as Ukrainians. Interesting, fascinating, and dynamic essays about literary texts and their influence on culture and society.
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Relationships2019Daughter
by Tamara Horikha Zernia
The events of the novel unfold in the spring and summer of 2014 in Donetsk. Donbas is a zeroing out point; it’s a place of strength where the country’s most important questions have sounded. And only there are the necessary answers hidden. It was here that the novel’s nameless heroine lost her family, home, job, and illusions, and it was here that she gathered up the fragments of her life and discovered new meaning and new support. Step by step the reader observes the process of transformation, the metamorphosis of a crop-sower into a warrior. Because war is when you eat the earth. So what’s more important than feeding the earth?
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Crime & mystery2021The principle of intervention
by Horikha Zernia
The "principle of intervention" is a detective story, a drama, a comedy, and a funny, touching story. It tells us about Stanislava, whose only support is work. The pure cold reason, logic, and mathematics. It is her safe space, the world where she sets her own game rules and feels safe. Suddenly she gets an offer she can't reject, but she can't accept it because it is strange, illogical, and dangerous. And yet, the associate professor of the department of higher and applied mathematics becomes a cook. She spent seven days in the city of her childhood, from which she once flew out in a traffic jam and vowed never to return. At least this week's task is to infiltrate the wedding and ensure that the bride is alive, to find and punish the murderer.
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FictionWHY I CAN'T WRITE
How to survive in a world where you can’t pay rent, can’t afford to focus, be healthy or to remain principled. Dijana Matković tells a powerful story of searching for a room of her own in the late stages of capitalism.
by DIJANA MATKOVIĆ
It is a coming-of-age story for Generation Z. How to grow up or even live in a world where no steady jobs are available, you can’t pay your rent and can’t afford medical or living expenses. Moreover, it touches on how to be a socially engaged artist in such a world, and more so, a woman in a post-me too world? Dijana, a daughter of working-class immigrants, tells the story of her difficult childhood and adolescence, how should became a journalist and later a writer in a society full of prejudices, glass ceilings and obstacles. How she gradually became a stereotypical ‘success story’, even though she still struggles with writing, because she can’t afford a ‘room of her own’. Dijana is a daughter of working-class immigrants, who came to Slovenia in the eighties in search of a better future. The family is building a house but is made redundant from the local factory when Yugoslavia is in the midst of an economic crisis. When her parents get divorced, Dijana, her older sister and mother struggle with basic needs. She is ashamed of their poverty, her classmates bully her because of her immigrant status, but mostly because of her being ‘white trash’. In the local school she meets teachers with prejudices against immigrants, but is helped by a librarian who spots her talent. When Dijana goes to secondary school, she moves in with her older sister who lives in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Her sister is into rave culture and Dijana starts to explore experimenting with drugs, music and dance. At the secondary school, she is again considered ‘the weird kid’, as she isn’t enough of a foreigner for other immigrant kids because she is from the country, yet she isn’t Slovenian enough for other native kids. She falls even deeper into drug addiction, fails the first year of school and has to move back to live with her mother. She takes on odd jobs to make ends meet. Whilst working as a waitress she encounters sexism and sexual violence from customers and abuse from the boss. She finishes night school and graduates. She meets many ‘lost’ people of her generation along the way, who tell her their stories about precarious, minimum wage jobs, lack of opportunities, expensive rent, etc. Dijana writes for numerous newspapers but loses or quits her job, because she isn’t allowed to write the stories she wants or because of the bad working conditions or the blatant sexual harassment. Due to the high rent in the capital, Dijana has to move to the countryside to live with her mother. She feels lonely there, struggles with anxiety and cannot write a second book, because she is constantly under pressure to make a living. She realises that she must persevere regardless of the obstacles, she must follow her inner truth and by writing about it, try to create a community of like-minded people, a community of people who support each other – all literature/art is social.
