The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology [Hardcover]

The publication of The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology commemorates the tenth year of the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series. Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Series has recurrently organized readings in the US for Ukraines leading writers since 2008. The anthology presents translations of literary works by Series guests that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in todays Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays by fifteen Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.Both Words for War and The White Chalk of Days, each in its own unique way, aim to provide English-speaking readers with the best examples of contemporary Ukrainian literature, while at the same time promoting it as diverse, inclusive, vibrant, and simply too riveting to be unknown or ignored. Andryczyks anthology presents a more sweeping picture of that literature by virtue of the wider thematic range and more extensive timespan of the featured selections. It has all the trappings of a classic companion to contemporary Ukrainian literature and an indispensable textbook for teachers and students engaged in that subject. Maria G. Rewakowicz, University of Washington,Slavic Review, Vol. 77, No. 4As the attentive reader will discover in the acknowledgements, the animating spirit for this volume took flight on a gentle evening when the Director of the Harriman Institute (the indomitable Catharine Nepomnyashchy), the editor of this volume (Mark Andryczyk), and the Director of the Kennan Institute (me) lamented the failure of scholarship to capture the depth, complexity, diversity, and fluidity of contemporary Ukrainl#,