International Education Awareness Week 2023: Books from the NMH Library

Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's territory and its existence as a sovereign nation. As the award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine's past in order to understand its present and future. An authoritative history of this vital country, The Gates of Europe provides a unique insight into the origins of the most dangerous international crisis since the end of the Cold War.

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain, a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes--the consequences of which still resonate today.

No story is more beloved by children and grownups alike than this wise, enchanting fable. One day, the author reminisces, when his plane was forced down in the Sahara a thousand miles from help, he encountered a most extraordinary small person. There are a few stories that in some way, in some degree, change the world forever for their readers. This is one.

"One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation." --Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker
Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.

Lesia Ukrainka was a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, and dramatist of universal importance. Her first collection of poetry, On the Wings of Song (1893), established her reputation as an accomplished lyrical poet. This collection contains her often-quoted poem "Contra spem spero" (Hope against Hope)--an expression of her remarkable strength of character and determination to face down a severe illness (tuberculosis of the bones) that afflicted her from an early age and caused her untimely death at the age of 42. Lesia Ukrainka wrote her masterpieces in the genres of drama and dramatic poetry, to which she turned her attention in the early 1900s. Many of her dramas were set in a variety of historical epochs, from those of ancient Greece and biblical Palestine to early modern Spain, eighteenth-century Muscovy, and the first Puritan settlers in America. Her most acclaimed play, The Song of the Forest (1911), is a symbolist fantasy drama in verse that evokes the neo-romantic concept of "living nature." Written in Kutaisi in the Caucasus two years before her death, it reflects Lesia Ukrainka's intense nostalgia for her native western Ukrainian region of Volhynia and her deep appreciation of the folkways, beliefs, and mythology of its countryside, where she grew up. In The Song of the Forest, Lesia Ukrainka expressed her deepest idealistic outlook, focusing on the contrast between good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, and highlighting the ideal of harmony between humans and nature and the importance of being a free, independent spirit. Patrick John Corness's meticulous translation of the play and his introduction and explanatory notes provide Anglophone readers with an opportunity to acquire a closer appreciation of this classic of Ukrainian literature.

Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history.   Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less--except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn--not only about their leaders, but also about their own people--stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world. A kind of Brave New World reflecting the China of our times, The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.

The Poet of Ukraine is a selection of poems written by Ukraine's most beloved literary figure, Taras Shevchenko. This compilation features a full biography, as well as, historical and political contextual commentary for each of the thirty-one selected poems.

Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China.  A New York Review Books Original   "[A] giant of modern Chinese literature" -The New York Times   "With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." -Ang Lee   Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction--tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation "Everyone can find something, if they only look carefully," reads one of the memorable lines from this first collection of poems in English by the world-renowned Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss, a daily crusade of testimonial, a final witness of abandoned lives in a claustrophobic universe where "every year there's less and less air." Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan's poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope, knowing that the will of a people "will never let it be / like it was before."

A Coeur d'Alene woman describes her painful history and that of her Native American people, and the liberating impact of her drive to become a writer.