Eastern Europe

In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors...

Russian-born journalist Mikhail Zygar was ten years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, after a decade of research, he offers a timely new approach to Russian history—one that rewrites everything we thought we knew about the fall of the Soviet Union and argues that what was perceived as a...

The definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory examination of how that hidden history shaped both Russia and the West. More than a century ago, the new Bolshevik government began sending Soviet...

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of...

In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers,...

My Secret Life is the first book in English translation of the poetry of Krisztina Tóth, one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, Krisztina Tóth is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many...

From the chef and owner of Agi’s Counter in Brooklyn comes a cookbook of 100 classic Hungarian and Jewish recipes reinvented for a new generation. Growing up a second-generation Hungarian Jew meant Jeremy Salamon spent a lot of time with family, gathered around a good meal. Jeremy honored both his...

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul.” Alexievich’s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage...

In the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the residents of a small co-op community outside of Kyiv find themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances, surrounded by occupying Russian forces. Pinched between Bucha and Borodianka, cut off from aid, and unable to escape, their...

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown—from innocent...

From 1979 to 1989 a million Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed 50,000 casualties—and the youth and humanity of many tens of thousands more. Creating controversy and outrage when it was first published in the USSR—it was called by reviewers there a “slanderous...