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Title details for The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye - Available

The Ukraine

by Artem Chapeye
Zenia Tompkins
ebook
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1 of 1 copy available
A stunning debut collection of fiction and creative nonfiction— irreverent and unglorified; loving and tender; uncomfortable and inconvenient—by a Ukrainian writer currently fighting for his country in Kyiv.
Includes the celebrated title story "The Ukraine," which was published in the New Yorker in 2022.
The Ukraine is a collection of 26 pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications.
  • In the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article “the” in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners. That pseudo-kitsch, often historically shallow, and not-quite-real Ukraine resonates because of its highly engaging and brutally candid snapshots of ordinary lives and typical places.

  • In “One Soul per Home” an elderly woman laments that the men are dying and the young are leaving for the cities, changing the face of her small town;

  • In “The Unscrupulous Spirit of the Provinces,” a couple of unspecified gender get stoned and go to church; and in “False Premises,” a man romanticizes his younger years working for a Soviet fishing fleet only to reconstruct his nostalgia in the face of Putin’s Russia.

    • The Ukraine conveys to readers a place that Chapeye and his countrymen are currently fighting for with their lives. The book features a preface by the author, which he composed on his phone from the front lines.

    • Creators

    • Publisher

    • Release date

      January 30, 2024

    • Formats

      • Kindle Book

      • OverDrive Read

        • ISBN: 9781644212967

      • EPUB ebook

        • ISBN: 9781644212967
        • File size: 3220 KB

    • Languages

      • English

    • Reviews

      • Publisher's Weekly

        November 27, 2023
        Journalist Chapeye’s gritty and perceptive debut collection gathers fiction and essays written from 2010 to 2018 to portray everyday life in Ukraine. The atmospheric opener, “Pan Ivan and the Three Bears,” follows a group of adventurous hunters through the frigid Sheshul Mountains. A stranger invites them to his cabin, where he recites three epic tales about man versus wild beasts. The broken family in the heart-wrenching “Sonny, Please...” struggles to survive in Kyiv amid poverty and strife between a grandmother and her alcoholic grandson. The nonfiction entry “Marmalade” describes an illegal excursion to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where “self-settlers” have chosen to call the forbidden irradiated landscape home. Chapeye, who has since enlisted in the Ukraine armed forces and wrote the book’s introduction from the front lines of the war against Russia, remarks that his entire family now lives in a tent city after evacuating Kyiv. Embedded within each character-driven piece is evidence of the passion, solidarity, and resilience of Ukrainian people. Chapeye’s grim stories resonate.

    Formats

    • Kindle Book
    • OverDrive Read
    • EPUB ebook

    subjects

    Languages

    • English

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