Description: The Ukraine is a collection of twenty-six pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications.
In the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article "the" in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners. That pseudo-kitsch, often historically shallow, and not-quite-real Ukraine resonates because of its highly engaging and brutally candid snapshots of ordinary lives and typical places. In "One Soul per Home" an elderly woman laments that the men are dying and the young are leaving for the cities, changing the face of her small town; In "The Unscrupulous Spirit of the Provinces," a couple of unspecified gender get stoned and go to church; and in "False Premises," a man romanticizes his younger years working for a Soviet fishing fleet only to reconstruct his nostalgia in the face of Putin's Russia. The Ukraine conveys to listeners a place that Chapeye and his countrymen are currently fighting for with their lives. The book features a preface by the author, which he composed on his phone from the front lines.Brief description: An author of both creative nonfiction and popular fiction, Artem Chapeye was born and raised in the small western Ukrainian city of Kolomyia, and has spent much of the last twenty years living in Kyiv. He is the author of two novels and four books of creative nonfiction, and is a coauthor of a book of war reportage. A four-time finalist of the BBC Book of the Year Award, his collection The Ukraine was one of three finalists in the award's new nonfiction category in 2018. Artem is an avid traveler who spent close to two years living, working, and traveling in the US and Central America-an experience that has greatly informed his writing. His work has been translated into seven languages, and has appeared in English in the Best European Fiction anthology and in publications such as Refugees Worldwide, translated by Marian Schwartz. Artem is a past recipient of the Central European Initiative Fellowship for Writers in Residence (Slovenia) and the Paul Celan Fellowship for Translators (Austria), as well as a finalist of the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism. He serves on the board of PEN Ukraine.