Daniel Stein, a Polish Jew, miraculously survives the Holocaust by working in the Gestapo as an interpreter. After the war, he converts to Catholicism, becomes a priest, enters the Order of Barefoot Carmelites and emigrates to Israel. Despite this seeming impossibility, the life and destiny of Daniel Stein are not an invention, the character is based on the life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel, a Carmelite monk. In Daniel Stein, Interpreter, Daniel s ability and willingness to communicate with all cultures, to translate across linguistic and cultural divides, assures his freedom and stands as a symbol of love, humanity and tolerance.

Daniel Stein,Translator

Ludmila Ulitskaya

Duckworth & Co.

The Funeral Party

August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN? This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Schocken

The Big Green Tent epitomizes what we think of when we imagine the classic Russian novel. With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya's remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys - an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets - struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for individual integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. A man and his wife both become collaborators without the other knowing; an artist is chased into the woods, where he remains in hiding for four years; a researcher is forced to deem a patient insane, damning him to torture in a psychiatric ward. Ludmila Ulitskaya's novel belongs to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: It is a work consumed with politics, love, and belief - and a revelation of life in dark times.

Big Green Tent, The

Literary

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Rudolf Maier, a young microbiologist working on a plague vaccine, is summoned to Moscow to deliver a progress report to his superiors. Inadvertently, he carries the virus with him from the lab. When his illness is discovered, the state machinery turns with terrifying efficiency, rounding up dozens of people. But for many, the distinction between this enforced, life-sparing isolation and the constant churn of political surveillance and arrests is barely detectable, and personal tragedy is not completely averted. Based on real events in the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s, this gripping novel, written in the late 1970s and rediscovered by the author during lockdown - and never before translated into English - surfaces uncomfortable truths about the current Russian regime and the pandemic crisis. Includes a new preface by the author.

Just the Plague

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Medical Books

Granta

GLAS' third collection of top women writers includes some internationally known names (Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Svetlana Alexiyevich, Olga Slavnikova, Ludmila Ulitskaya) as well as some other noted women authors appearing for the first time in English (Nina Gorlanova, Margarita Sharapova, Natalia Smirnova, Anastasia Gosteva).

Nine: An Anthology of Russia's Foremost Woman Writers

Svetlana Alexiyevich

Maria Arbatova

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Olga Slavnikova

Margarita Sharapova

GLAS New Russian Writing

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Books by Ludmila Ulitskaya