by Giulia Medaglini

The name is Julia but not as in the English spelling. Pretty Woman came out when I was born but it was dubbed in my country, you know? Nyet. Not even Yulia. It’s spelled with the “G” of grit and the “I” of incomer. Like that. Sì.

It lasts for more than a year: I can't read, that is, I can, but I don't want to. My appetite is already gone halfway into the book. I count every page I have read and still need to read. I can't wait for the count to show 0. Books surround me everywhere: they are my job, and without them, I am nobody. I feel like an old, impotent man among many beautiful women, none of whom he can fuck.

Interviewed by Hanna Leliv

During the collaboration, each translator functioned as both the capable guide (in their native language) and the novice traveler (in their peer’s language).

by Justina Dobush
Translated from the Ukrainian by Yulia Lyubka

You read and read and read. You love some and you love others. Žižek says not to love the new hysterical left, Peterson says to love yourself, not to love feminists or the same new hysterical left. The New York Times says to read about people's rights, Trump says to read Twitter, Putin says not to read anything at all. Zuckerberg tells Cambridge Analytica to read other people’s messages, Islamists say to read the Quran, the Ministry of Justice doesn't read the constitution, the younger generation reads only Telegram and Instagram.

Interviewed by Kate Tsurkan

The constant reading of the Bible opens up more and more to you; sometimes, you just fall into a stupor. This Book is endless and the only one that you can and should read all your life.

by Andriy Lyubka
Translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

That December evening, fog had to settle on Uzhhorod, a drunk judge at the wheel of a BMW X5 had to be flying along the slick asphalt of Hrushevskiy Street, staring at his phone—he didn’t notice, didn’t react, didn’t brake—and slam into my wife’s tender, 115-pound body with two tons of black metal, and she had to flutter into the air and land on the ground, already dead, and that damn German airbag simply had to pop out and save the driver, for me, twenty-nine years into my life, to finally have a real purpose.

by Vasyl Makhno
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

Brooklyn’s Forty-Second Street in Borough Park is unenticing and monotone, as are the rest of the surrounding streets. In the winter, it’s cleaner than in the summer. In the fall, it’s warmer than in the spring. The industrial zones on the shores of New York Harbor—Sunset Park and Green-Wood Cemetery—cling to it like tipsy bridesmaids so that, God forbid, it not give them the slip. It’s intersected—or, more precisely, interrupted—by the Mexican Fifth, the Chinese Eighth, and the Hasidic Thirteenth Avenues, and in one spot the metal structure of the subway that covers all of New Utrecht hangs above it.

by Lena Eltang
Translated from the Russian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

When I was a little girl, I thought time was like a ball; what we call the past is still happening, concurrently with our present lives. It’s just on the other side of the ball, and if you find the right tunnel, you can descend into times past and take a look at the people who lived them. For me, olive trees were tunnels like that—after all, they live for about two thousand years. It’s nice to think you’re touching the same trunk as one of the Argonauts who landed at Salerno. It’s a real shame my teachers disabused me of that notion; if they hadn’t, I’d be free to think that little Brie was still out there somewhere, walking down his own path.

by Brinda Banerjee

Andre Zachalenko, the apartment complex super, stomped in the front door at number 102, determined to project displeasure at being dragged out on that rainy morning to do his job. He inhaled the aroma of cinnamon, cloves and fried onions in the air. His native Russian cooking smells were vastly different.

BY MICHAELA KOSTKOVÁ

by Teodora Taneva
Translated from the Bulgarian by Elitza Kotzeva

They remain silent
for they don’t want to share a common language
with their enemies.
They remain silent in their thoughts, silent with their eyes, their hands, their souls,
they even breathe silently, like flowers

by Georgi Atanassov
Translated from the Bulgarian by Elitza Kotzeva

Sixty years ago
In Lom they were killing all crows.
They’d sign a paper
to get a handgun
with an ammo box.

by Vania Valkova
Translated from the Bulgarian by Elitza Kotzeva

The new slaves are abundantly obedient
Socialize politely in slow-tedious style, yet
Always have their nails exquisitely done 
and well charged robots full of smiles to don. 

by Vladislav Davidzon

If broken, a law of mesira
is a mortifying plume
writing denunciations is no art
high incidence of illiterates
involved in
regressed resplendence
bony spinster's joints

by Diana Manole

What else do you want? The crisis centres’ phone numbers already blink
on oversized billboards
at both ends of the bridges
above six-lane highways crossing cities to prevent traffic delays
during rush hours.

by Stephan Roll
Translated from the Romanian by Henry Finch

In the moonlight your eye lacks a pupil
But flowers you lead by hand
Inverse praying to the consecrated saints
Like the taste of the fountain’s black stones

by Zita Izsó 
Translated from the Hungarian by Timea Balogh

We lay with our faces in the sand. 
For a long time, we dare not believe this is the shore.
We don’t know how many of us made it,
how many we lost.

Interviewed by Justina Dobush

Literature is an experience of beauty and love, the beauty of being, and the love of being. Literature is actually a small packed being that lives inside of us. This is why we respect Homer, Shakespeare, Dante.

by Maxym Dupeshko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

I don’t know what lures me here. I come to this mountain a few times a year as to a place of spiritual pilgrimage, foraging here for air suffused with oxygen atoms and the scent of conifers. Though that’s most likely only part of it. It’s not just the taste of the air, not just the sweet headiness of the beech and fir trees, not just the pleasant height with its distant Bukovynian skyline, but also… But also something impalpable that unfurls through this space and pulsates all around. 

by Yuri Andrukhovych
Translated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky

In all the years given to him Mario Pongratz committed only one murder. He would only have to face the responsibility for it at the heavenly court, and the details of that closed trial remain unknown—for understandable reasons. As for the earthly court, it was very open indeed and sentenced Mario Pongratz under a completely different article. However, this is not at all the beginning, but rather one of the endings of this story, and it looms somewhere far ahead, sometime in the 1890s.