Oksana Zabuzhko, author of “the most influential Ukrainian book in the fifteen years since independence,” Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, returns with a gripping short story collection. Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine’s leading public intellectual, is called upon to make sense of the unthinkable reality of our times. In this breathtaking short story collection, she turns the concept of truth over in her hands like a beautifully crafted pair of gloves. From the triumph of the Orange Revolution, which marked the start of the twenty-first century, to domestic victories in matchmaking, sibling rivalry, and even tennis, Zabuzhko manages to shock the reader by juxtaposing things as they are—inarguable, visible to the naked eye—with how things could be, weaving myth and fairy tale into pivotal moments just as we weave a satisfying narrative arc into our own personal mythologies. At once intimate and worldly, these stories resonate with Zabuzhko’s irreverent and prescient voice, echoing long after reading.

The mother of a childhood friend summons Nick Blud back to his old Ukranian-American New Jersey neighborhood, where something unspeakable has just happened, in this harrowing tale about friendship and love, America, and the immigrant's dream.

What Is Told is a masterful novel that sprints across generations, centuries and continents. In a spirited narrative that travels from old Ukraine to New Jersey, Askold Melnyczuk follows his character through the betrayals of war and the promises of marriage. Zenon and Natalka Zabobon marry the day Archduke Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo. When Natalka wins the battle of the bedroom, Zenon throws his energies into making sure his country doesn't completely disappear from the map. His brother Stefan, meanwhile, renounces the abstractions of nationalism for the certain pleasures of Paris and his two mistresses, a mother and daughter. Transplanted to the strange soil of the new world by the upheavals of World War II, the family finds itself unprepared for the subtle sabotages of peacetime suburbia. With the ghosts of their extraordinary past never far away, the voyagers resort to the strategies learned in the struggle again the Tartars, Nazis, and Communists. The results are as comic as they are unexpected. In What Is Told, Askold Melnyczuk reinvents with humor and compassion, the story of a people long hidden behind the Iron Curtain. His novel is a reminder that history is not something that happens only to others.

A passionate story of friendship, family, and the other side of the American dream. One Sunday morning, Nick Blud, a successful Boston physician, is home in bed when he receives a phone call from Adriana Kruk, the mother of a boyhood friend. The beautiful Adriana, who once vacationed at her family's luxurious summer home on the Black Sea, now lives in a run-down apartment in New Jersey. Abandoned by her husband and estranged from her sons, she summons Nick back to his old neighborhood, where something unspeakable has happened --exactly what, no one is willing to say.Ambassador of the Dead is a harrowing tale of ambitions gone awry, and an unflinching meditation on exile and assimilation and the cost of love.