The Ukrainian And Russian Notebooks

Graphic novelist Igort illuminates two harrowing moments in recent history--the Ukraine famine and the assassination of a Russian journalist.

Japan is a place of special fascination for the acclaimed international comics creator Igort, who has visited and lived there more than 20 times, and worked in the country's manga industry for more than a decade. In this masterful new book—part graphic memoir, part cultural meditation—Igort vividly recounts his personal experiences in Japan, creating comics amid the activities of everyday life, and finding inspiration everywhere: in nature, history, custom, art, and encounters with creators including animation visionary Hayao Miyazaki. With beautifully illustrated reflections on subjects from printmaking to Zen Buddhism, imperial history to the samurai code, Japanese film, literature, and manga, this is a richly rewarding book for anyone interested in Japan or comic arts practiced at the highest level.

Winner of the 2018 Lionel Gelber Prize From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and Iron Curtain, winner of the Cundill Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, a revelatory history of Stalin's greatest crime. In 1929, Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization -- in effect a second Russian revolution -- which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people perished between 1931 and 1933 in the U.S.S.R. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum reveals for the first time that three million of them died not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy, but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: that Stalin set out to exterminate a vast swath of the Ukrainian population and replace them with more cooperative, Russian-speaking peasants. A peaceful Ukraine would provide the Soviets with a safe buffer between itself and Europe, and would be a bread basket region to feed Soviet cities and factory workers. When the province rebelled against collectivization, Stalin sealed the borders and began systematic food seizures. Starving, people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.

The spellbinding true story of the infamous Ukrainian anarchist and revolutionary.

"The epic tale of the rise to power of Russia's current president-- of his emergence from shrouded obscurity and deprivation to become one of the most consequential and complicated leaders in modern history." --

A debut graphic novel traces the author's parents' difficult decision to pursue greater freedom on the other side of the Berlin Wall in the early 1980s and their costly rejection of communist politics. Simultaneous.

"This book provides the first systematic overview of witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine, combining scholarly commentary with primary source materials translated from Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian, most of which have never before been published" --

This unique document of the Russian author's creative process is illustrated by facsimiles of original pages from his notebooks, which reveal at least eight plans for the story, each with numerous variations.