Serhiy Zhadan, recipient of the 2022 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the 2022 German Peace Prize, is widely considered to be one of the most important young writers in Ukraine. He has received several international literature prizes and has twice won BBC Ukraine’s Book of the Year award. His other books include The Orphanage and What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems. Reilly Costigan-Humes lives and works in Moscow, and translates literature from the Ukrainian and Russian. Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is a translator and poet from New England whose work has appeared in numerous journals. Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps have been translating Ukrainian poetry as a team since 1989 and have received an NEA Translations Fellowship for their work on Zhadan’s poetry.
“Perhaps that is Zhadan’s greatest achievement. Transforming
Kharkiv into Mesopotamia, he renders it as a place of irrepressible
life and inexhaustible love. And, in doing so, he urges us out and
into the world, to be with and for each other. His Ukraine is a
republic of love.”—Jacob Reynolds, Spiked
“To say that Serhiy Zhadan is a great Ukrainian novelist of whom
you might not have heard does not begin to cover it. Serhiy Zhadan
is one of the most important creators of European culture at work
today. His novels, poems, and songs touch millions. This loving
translation is a chance to see Ukraine in terms other than the
familiar, but more importantly a chance to allow prose to mend your
mind.”—Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny
“One of the most astounding novels to come out of modern Ukraine.
Mesopotamia is seductive, twisted, brilliant, and fierce. It brings
to mind our own fiction from a time when we still felt like we had
something to fight for and a chance we could win.”—Gary Shteyngart,
author of Little Failure and Absurdistan
“Unlike Joyce’s Dublin, the cradle of Zhadan’s civilization is a
place of refuge for young people fleeing hardscrabble lives in the
provinces, and a hardscrabble home for natives buoyed by desire yet
adrift amid the flotsam of a spent empire. The men and women in
these comic and heartfelt pages endure the dynamic paralysis that
comes over those who are all dressed up with nowhere to go. They
aspire, struggle, fight, fail, drink, fuck, and then they fight
some more. Amid the city’s detritus, they refuse to become part of
it by continuing to love and dream. There is nothing marginal
about them. They insist on being seen, heard, understood.
They will charm and madden you. They will haunt your dreams, and
you will never forget them.”—Askold Melnyczuk, author of House of
Widows
“To say that Serhiy Zhadan is a poet, a novelist, a rock star, a
protester, a symbol of his country’s desire for freedom and change,
is to say the truth—but what is truth? Zhadan is a literary master
of enormous force. At times he combines the energy of Jack Kerouac
and atmospheric spell of Isaac Babel, at other times he is a
balladeer of his country’s struggle. ‘Such strange things have been
happening to us,’ he writes, of the streets where ‘winters are not
like winters / winters live under assumed names.’ In Mesopotamia’s
nine stories and thirty poems we find ourselves in the newly
independent Ukraine, stunned by its grit, its rough backbone—and
its tenderness. What do we discover here? That ‘Light is shaped by
darkness / and it’s all up to us.’ We also discover that Serhiy
Zhadan is one of those rare things—almost impossible to find now in
the West—a national bard, a chronicler. This is a book to live
with.”—Ilya Kaminsky
“Zhadan is the rock star of lyrical melancholy, and Mesopotamia is
not just a book of short stories but a cosmos with Kharkiv-Babylon
at its center. We meet its lovesick citizens at weddings and
funerals; their visceral, fantastical lives unfold in the intensely
prophetic atmosphere of the upcoming war.”— Valzhyna Mort, author
of Factory of Tears
“With tales at once earthy and phantasmagorical, sentimental and
anarchic, Zhadan is an exhilarating chronicler of a new kind of
borderlands.”—Sana Krasikov
“Mesopotamia offers a sublime experience of taking you right to the
middle of a very specific world, where you eat and drink and love
and fight and die with the characters, until you notice that that
world has transcended the time and place and became part of the
eternal human story.”—Lara Vapnyar, author of Still Here: A
Novel
“Serhiy Zhadan’s dazzling novel—here fantastically well
translated—evokes voices that get under our skin and take us into
the rich inner life of people about whom we have long known
nothing.”—Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate
History of Revolution
“Mesopotamia finds poetry in the most unlikely places—in the bars,
tower blocks, and concrete boulevards of a Ukrainian city. By turns
funny, shocking, and touching, weaving between the lyrical and the
grotesque, Zhadan’s stories provide a lesson in belonging.”—Uilleam
Blacker, University College London
“To know Dublin, read your Joyce, for Macondo, García Márquez, and
for Mesopotamia, Serhiy Zhadan. Of course this Mesopotamia is not
the Birthplace of Civilization (or is it?), it’s Kharkiv, the
Ukrainian Center of Nothing, located smack-dab on the Russian
border, which, in Zhadan’s brilliant vision, is smack-dab in the
middle of life lived beyond the fullest because any second could be
your last, creaming with joy, madness, war, orgasm, stupidity, and
a blinding light that smells like the essence of human spirit. We
need to learn from Ukraine. Zhadan is a masterful teacher. The use
of poetry as Notes—so far as I know, this has never been done
before and is positively Nabokovian. This book is world-class
literature.”—Bob Holman, author of Sing This One Back To Me
“Mesopotamia is a portrait of post-Soviet Ukraine’s lost
generation, of people who came of age in the disorienting
conditions of crumbling Soviet order and stagnating social
transformation. Serhiy Zhadan gives voice to his generation from
Ukraine’s eastern regions bordering Russia. These are the people
who have been missing from contemporary literature, whether in
Ukrainian or in any other language. To understand the background to
the crisis in this region, which has had such a major impact on the
world recently, perhaps no other writer can provide insights as
powerful as Zhadan.”—Vitaly Chernetsky, University of Kansas
“Serhiy Zhadan has written a love song to contemporary Eastern
Ukraine—vices, passions, and ghosts included. His Kharkiv is filled
with gritty stairwells, red nightgowns, raw love, and a bit of
magic. Costigan-Humes and Wheeler have brought Zhadan’s evocative
prose to life for the English reader.”—Amelia Glaser, University of
California, San Diego
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