The publication of “The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology,” compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk, commemorates the 10th year of the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series. The series is 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, and has organized readings in the U.S. for Ukraine’s leading writers since 2008.
The anthology presents translations into English of literary works by series guests that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today’s Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction and essays by 15 Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past 15 years.
Mr. Andryczyk has been teaching Ukrainian literature at Columbia University and administering the Ukrainian Studies Program at its Harriman Institute since 2007. He is the author of the monograph “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction”
(University of Toronto Press, 2012; Ukrainian edition, Piramida, 2014) and a translator of Ukrainian literature into English.
Advance copies of “The White Chalk of Days” have received many positive reviews.
Serhy Yekelchyk, professor of Slavic studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, writes that it “will serve as an indispensable, near-comprehensive introduction to contemporary Ukrainian literature. …The anthology brings together the authors who entered the literary scene in the 1970s and those born in the 1980s, thus covering the entire period of the Soviet collapse and Ukrainian independence.”
Polina Barskova, associate professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, says it presents “contemporary Ukrainian literature in its diverse, changing and becoming nature,” and that it presents the opportunity of “enjoying a radical and exciting variety of genres, thematic approaches, and political and aesthetic positions.”
Sibelan Forrester, professor of modern and classical languages and Russian at Swarthmore College, notes: “ ‘The White Chalk of Days’… brings together work reflecting the past, be it historic or sordid, and the vibrant present, collective or idiosyncratic individual experiences, often humorous or deeply moving. Bravo …to editor Mark Andryczyk and his 16 fellow translators.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Lloyd Schwarts writes: “Some of the liveliest and most moving literature in the world is also some of the least known in English. So blessings on editor and translator Mark Andryczyk and the team of expert and eloquent translators he has assembled for bringing us this abundant new anthology of poetry and fiction from Ukraine of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. …What the reader will be most grateful for is the sheer pleasure of it.”
“The White Chalk of Days” is available from online retailers such as Amazon, or through the publisher at www.academicstudiespress/the-white-chalk-of-days.