Translated from Spanish by Anna KushnerPublished by Bitter Lemon Press / Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2014, 592 pages. Original version published in 2009. “If the social dream and economic utopia supporting it had become corrupt to the core, what remained of the greatest experiment man had ever dreamed of?” It is easy to forget today …
Tag: Soviet Union
Voices from Chernobyl—The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster: Svetlana Alexievich
Translated from Russian by Keith GessenPublished by Picador / Dalkey Archive Press, 2005, 240 pages. Original version published in 1997. "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air." On 26 April 1986, Energy Block No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was …
Continue reading Voices from Chernobyl—The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster: Svetlana Alexievich
Child 44: Tom Rob Smith
Published by Simon & Schuster UK / Grand Central Publishing, 2008, 484 pages. Child 44 is set in the USSR towards the end of Stalin’s regime, a Utopia where crime—and therefore criminals—no longer exist. Or at least that’s what the state wants people to believe. What this actually means is that murders cannot be reported, …
Talking About Books 