Hamlet called America

“A lost archetypal village—a universe unto itself, with its own mythology and eccentric characters who feel utterly alive and real. A distinctive kind of magical realism coming from Ukraine’s inexhaustible oral tradition, both past and present. Khrystia Vengryniuk writes with remarkable flair and imagination, effortlessly bringing together the everyday and the absurd, weaving stories and voices that linger long after the last page.”—Georgi Gospodinov, author of Death and the Gardener “There are books that have every right to become cult and iconic for literature. Khrystia Vengryniuk’s book is one of them. The Hamlet Called America tells about the ‘deep’ Ukraine, a Ukraine that Bosch could have painted or Marquez could have described. The wonderful and vivid microcosm of the characters and events of this novel will remain in the reader’s thoughts for a long time.”—Andrey Kurkov, author of The Silver Bone In The Hamlet Called America, Khrystia Vengryniuk has brilliantly rendered the Ukrainian village of America. This unforgettable portrait of eccentric characters living, loving, and losing together—including the young woman who wants nothing more than to give birth, a mysteriously mystical loner, and a cranky great grandmother who curses everyone—captures what can happen when the perceived independence of isolation becomes a vulnerability. "Everyone living in the hamlet called America knew nothing was more beautiful than dawn over their land, when golden hues spilled through the forest, and the trees were bathed in it like infants during baptism. Grandpa Kosar, who stood in front of his house every morning to pray to the sun, was always the first to witness this. Grandpa Kosar never believed in a single God — he seemed to have lived in the hamlet since the time of the first pagans, and for him, there were as many gods as there were stars in the sky. His long-armed wife, Aunt Agnia, who curiously had never been called Grandma Agnia by any­one, served as America’s only midwife and doctor. Everyone was terribly afraid that if she became ill, no one would be able to help, as she alone possessed the knowledge of the healing potions she made, recipes she kept secret as if to maintain a valid reason to live forever. On the other hand, no one could recall a time when she had ever fallen ill, and no one knew who had helped deliver her sickly son, Taras. Some people said Grandpa Kosar had been punished for not believing in God, and now he had to suffer for it all his life. Grandpa Kosar didn’t think this, however, because after the birth of his son he was never seen in church or at the house of the famous monk who lived not far from the hamlet. Either Grandpa Kosar kept his suffering a secret or didn’t feel cursed having such a child. He never complained to anyone, accepting it calmly as anything that was inevitable." Khrystia Vengryniuk is an award-winning writer, literary critic, and painter from Chernivtsi. She is the author of the poetry collections The Long Eyes and About My Old White Drake, the short story collection To Be Born and Die in Shoes, as well as multiple children’s books. She is the cofounder of Chorni Vivtsi, one of Ukraine’s leading publishing houses for children. Her work has appeared in English translation in The Transla­tion Review, Asymptote, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Trafika Europe, The Dewdrop, The Kyiv Independent, and Apofenie. Dmytro Kyyan is a Ukrainian-American writer, editor, and translator originally from Kharkiv. From the 1990s to the early aughts he was the editor-in-chief of Foto & Video Magazine and under his direction, it became the leading publication in photography throughout Eastern Europe. He co-translated with Kate Tsurkan Oleh Sentsov’s Diary of a Hunger Striker. Kate Tsurkan is a reporter at The Kyiv Independent, where she writes mainly about culture-related topics. Her writing and translations have also appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She is the founding editor of Apofenie.