With Madonna in Kyiv

Collected here for the first time are selected essays, reviews, and remembrances by the award-winning Askold Melnyczuk—novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and editor—who has, for half a century, played an active role in shaping the American literary conversation. Articulating an unwavering faith in the civilizing power of literature, Melnyczuk’s With Madonna in Kyiv brings together meditations on the literary arts alongside recollections of writer-friends Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Oksana Zabuzhko, and others. This ardent, wide-ranging volume also includes pieces on writers such as Samuel Beckett, Grace Paley, Elias Khoury, Julian Barnes, Milan Kundera, Olga Tokarczuk, Delmore Schwartz, Alvaro Mutis, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, Lesia Ukrainka, Vasyl Stus, and Volodymyr Dibrova.