Search Results: Authors starting with P from Globus Books

TASCHEN, 2022. New Book. Hardcover. 520 pp. At the intersection of the visual, graphic, and cinematic arts, film posters are a unique and thrilling record of a particular cultural Zeitgeist. This book brings together 250 posters from the pre-Stalin Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s to explore the energy and invention of this period, before Soviet Realism became the official art doctrine. Drawn from the private collection of connoisseur Susan Pack, the selection includes the work of 27 different artists. From bold figuration to architectural elements, each artist displays a distinct style and aesthetic, as much as they collectively eschew the glamour of Hollywood for more stark, striking, even challenging images, often marked by unusual angles, dynamic compositions, and startling close-ups.

Iris Press, 2020. New Book. Paperback. 148 pp. The Long Vacation by Alex Panasenko is his gripping account of World War II as seen through the eyes of a young boy. The story begins in October 1941 when 8-year-old Alex enters elementary school in Kharkov, Ukraine. Soon after, Hitler's invading army reaches the city. Alex witnesses the battle for the city and the ensuing starvation and execution of civilian hostages under German occupation. To save his family, Alex's father goes to work for the Germans as an agricultural research scientist. When the Red Army counterattacks, the family retreats across a devastated Ukraine with the Germans. In Germany, Alex, now eleven, is taken from his parents, labeled a Slavic Ostarbeiter (subhuman), and placed in a labor camp. Now on his own, Alex experiences months of grueling labor, starvation, and misery. When the victorious Russians draw near and the camp breaks up, he runs away and retreats with the Germans. Traveling west through Germany, he experiences the… Read More

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968. Paperback, 39 pp. A magnificent collection dedicated to presenting the work of the greatest artists of all time. Each volume contains 80 full-color plates, a biography of the artist, and a critical appraisal of his work written by a leading expert. A true encyclopedia of art in which volume stands alone as an authoritative treatise.

New York: Vintage, 2011. New Book. Paperback. 704 pp. First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara, the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times. Pevear and Volokhonsky masterfully restore the spirit of Pasternak's original--his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone--in this beautiful translation of a classic of world literature.

Must Have Books, 2021. New Book. Paperback 256 pages Safe Conduct is Boris Pasternak's first and best autobiography, penned after the great success of Dr. Zhivago. Here translated by Alec Brown and Lydia Pasternak-Slater, and written when he was forty, Safe Conduct puzzled many readers in Russia and when it appeared in English, because its isolated sharp impressions and juxtapositions seem to deny chronology, but at least one critic recognized it as "the most original of autobiographies, employing a new technique of great important.

Academic Studies Press, 2008. New Book. Paperback. 330 pp. Major statements by the celebrated Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) about poetry, inspiration, the creative process, and the significance of artistic/literary creativity in his own life as well as in human life altogether, are presented here in his own words (in translation) and are discussed in the extensive commentaries and introduction. The texts range from 1910 to 1946 and are between two and ninety pages long. There are commentaries on all the texts, as well as a final essay on Pasternak's famous novel, Doctor Zhivago, which is looked at here in the light of what it says on art and inspiration. Although universally acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, Pasternak is not yet sufficiently recognized as the highly original and important thinker that he also was. All his life he thought and wrote about the nature and significance of the experience of inspiration, though avoiding the word "inspiration"… Read More

Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. New Book. Paperback. 430 pp. Twenty years ago, Allen Paul wrote the first post-communist account of one of the greatest but least-known tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalin's annihilation of Poland's officer corps and massive deportation of so-called bourgeoisie elements to Siberia. Today, these brutal events are symbolized by one word: Katyn, a crime that still bitterly divides Poles and Russians. Paul's richly updated account covers Russian attempts to recant their admission of guilt for the murders in Katyn Forest and includes recently translated documents from Russian military archives, eyewitness accounts of two perpetrators, and secret official minutes published here for the first time that confirm that U.S. government cover-up of the crime continued long after the war ended. Paul's masterful narrative recreates what daily life was like for three Polish families amid momentous events of World War II--from the treacherous Nazi-Soviet invasion in… Read More

New York Review of Books, 2023. New Book. Paperback. 816 pp. One of the most famous works of Russian literature, a memoir about a writer's coming of age during World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the rise of the Soviet era. This is the first unabridged translation of the first three books of Konstantin Paustovsky's magnum opus. In 1943, the Soviet author Konstantin Paustovsky started out on what would prove a masterwork, The Story of a Life, a grand, novelistic memoir of a life spent on the ravaged frontier of Russian history. Eventually expanding to fill six volumes, this extraordinary work of a lifetime would establish Paustovsky as one of Russia's great writers and lead to a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here the first three books of Paustovsky's epic autobiography--long unavailable in English--appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovsky's Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings… Read More

Columbia University Press, 2019. New Book. Paperback. 176 pp. An unsung classic of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Karolina Pavlova's A Double Life alternates prose and poetry to offer a wry picture of Russian aristocratic society and vivid dreams of escaping its strictures. Pavlova combines rich narrative prose that details balls, tea parties, and horseback rides with poetic interludes that depict her protagonist's inner world--and biting irony that pervades a seemingly romantic description of a young woman who has everything. A Double Life tells the story of Cecily, who is being trapped into marriage by her well-meaning mother; her best friend, Olga; and Olga's mother, who means to clear the way for a wealthier suitor for her own daughter by marrying off Cecily first. Cecily's privileged upbringing makes her oblivious to the havoc that is being wreaked around her. Only in the seclusion of her bedroom is her imagination freed: each day of deception is followed by a night of dreams… Read More

New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1998. New Book. Paperback. 154 pp. Omon Ra, by the gifted Russian writer Victor Pelevin, is a pointed, dead-on-satire of the now-defunct Soviet space program, and a moving account of a cosmonaut's coming-of-age. The story is told in the beguiling voice of its young protagonist, Omon Ra, whose odd name combines a term for the Soviet special forces with the name of the sun god in Egyptian mythology. Ever since he was a boy, Omon has dreamed of flying in space. He enrolls in a training program for cosmonauts, only to learn that his first assignment will also be his last. For although the Soviet space program claims to carry out its missions with unmanned rockets, its scientists haven't yet mastered the necessary technology; so Omon is to drive a supposedly unmanned landing vehicle across the moon's surface, put in place a device that will emit the words of Lenin into space, and then remain on the moon, abandoned, until he dies. The voyage that results combines… Read More

Canongate Us, 2007. New Book. Paperback. 288 pp. Victor Pelevin, the iconoclastic and wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. By creating a mesmerizing world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide, The Helmet of Horror is a radical retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur set in an Internet chat room. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue they cannot escape -- a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first… Read More

Penguin Books, 2006. New Book. Paperback. 256 pp. The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up a huge consumer market, but how do you sell things to a generation that grew up with just one type of cola? When Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, he finds he has a talent for putting distinctively Russian twists on Western-style ads. But his success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevera, who, by way of a Ouija board, communicates theories of consumer theology. A bestseller in Russia, Homo Zapiens displays the biting absurdist satire that has gained Victor Pelevin superstar status among today's Russian youth, disapproval from the conservative Moscow literary world, and critical acclaim worldwide.

Harvard University Press, 2020. New Book. Paperback. 384 pp. In September 1941, two and a half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million lives. It was one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured it. Drawing on unpublished diaries, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how young and old struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested many of Leningrad's wartime leaders. Some were executed. Diaries--now dangerous to their authors--were concealed, shelved in archives, and forgotten. The War Within recovers these lost accounts, shedding light on one of World War II's darkest episodes while paying tribute the resilience of the… Read More

Moscow: Glas, 2000. New Book. Paperback. 191 pp., illustrated Bulgakov and Mandelstam never met and yet their lives had much in common. Both men were born in the same year, 1891, and both lives ended prematurely, crushed by the cruel totalitarian system. Mandelstam died in a Siberian gulag in December 1938, and Bulgakov 14 months later, in March 1940, from a terminal illness, probably brought on by unbearable stress and disillusionment. Despite their obvious genius both were largely unappreciated and unrecognized except by a handful of close friends who gave them encouragement and moral suport. Both had unusually close relationships with their wives who inspired their work during their lifetime and enthusiastically promoted it after their deaths. If it were not for the wives' courageous efforts against all odds, world literature would have lost Mandelstam's luminous poetry and Bulgakov's superb magic realism. Included are: Photo biographies of both Bulgakov and Mandelstam. Memoirs by Mandelstam's… Read More

Cornell University Press, 2022. New Book. Hardcover. 276 pp. Places of Tenderness and Heat is a ground-level exploration of queer St. Petersburg at the fin-de-siècle. Olga Petri takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized. She reconstructs the milieu that enabled them to navigate a city full of risk and opportunity. Focusing on a non-Western, unexplored, and fragile form of urban modernity, Petri reconstructs a broad picture of queer sociability. In addition to drawing on explicitly recorded incidents that led to prosecution or medical treatment, she investigates the many encounters that escaped bureaucratic surveillance and suppression. Her work reveals how queer men's lives were conditioned by developing urban infrastructure, weather, light and lighting, and the informal constraints on enforcing law and moral order in the city's public spaces. Places of Tenderness and Heat is an ambitious record of the dynamic… Read More

New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. New Book. Paperback. 208 pp. Moscow in the middle of the seventeenth century had a distinctly apocalyptic feel. An outbreak of the plague killed half the population. A solar eclipse and comet appeared in the sky, causing panic. And a religious reform movement intended to purify spiritual life and provide for the needy had become a violent political project that cleaved Russian society and the Orthodox Church in two. The autobiography of Archpriest Avvakum--a leader of the Old Believers, who opposed liturgical and ecclesiastical reforms--provides a vivid account of these cataclysmic events from a figure at their center. Written in the 1660s and '70s from a cell in an Arctic village where the archpriest had been imprisoned by the tsar, Avvakum's autobiography is a record of his life, ecclesiastical career, painful exile, religious persecution, and imprisonment. It is also a salvo in a contest about whether to follow the old Russian Orthodox liturgy or… Read More

Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021. New Book. Paperback. 140 pp. "One of Russia's best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next." --The New York Times At first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seems simple, even child-like, but a deep reading reveals satire and darkness manifested through classic fairy tale tropes characteristically upended by Petrushevskaya. These "adult fairy tales" ask deep questions about gender, love, history, memory, and the future, taking place in times between history and the now. These stories, quirky but yet inspired by a confident hopefulness, will inspire and provoke English-speaking readers across the globe.

Deep Vellum Publishing, 2023. New Book. Paperback. 268 pp. From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Russia's greatest living absurdist and surrealistic writer and New York Times bestseller: traditional family drama meet burlesque social satire, enveloped in a Bollywood soap-opera plot. Set in the 1980s and '90s, Kidnapped focuses on the life of Alina, a promising language student who must drop her academic career because of an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give up a baby for adoption after birth and is set to leave the hospital alone. In the hospital she meets another girl, Masha, who is happily looking forward to the childbirth and speaks up of her life plans with the husband in a republic in South Asia. When Masha dies in childbirth, Alina impulsively exchanges the babies' name bracelets in an attempt to send her newborn son away from the dull reality of Soviet life. But then the unthinkable happens: Masha's husband asks Alina to falsify her identity and come with him in the foreign service. Full… Read More

New York: Harlequin Trade, 2020. New book. Paperback 350 pp. The incredible story of the first African American military pilot, who went on to become a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history. After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun. All Blood Runs Red is the inspiring untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking chronicle of the twentieth century and a portrait of a man who came from nothing and by his own courage, determination, gumption, intelligence and… Read More

Experiment, 2023. New Book. Hardcover. 464 pp., ill. Initially a victory line where Allies met at the end of World War Two, the Iron Curtain quickly became the front of a new kind of war. It divided Europe from north to south for a staggering forty-five years. Crossing it in either direction was always a political act; in many cases, it was a crime to even talk about doing so. New generations have grown up since these borders came down, freed from the restrictions of the Cold War era. But what has the Iron Curtain left in its wake? Timothy Phillips travels its full 3,000-mile route--from inside the Arctic Circle to where Armenia meets Azerbaijan and Turkey--to craft this epic new people's history of a defining 2oth-century conflict. Here, in the borderlands where a powerful clash of civilizations took form in concrete and barbed wire, he uncovers the remarkable stories of everyday people forever imprinted by life in the Curtain's long shadow. Some look back on the era with nostalgia, even… Read More