When German journalist Jens Mühling met Juri, a Russian television producer selling stories about his homeland, he was mesmerized by what he heard: the real Russia and Ukraine were more unbelievable than anything he could have invented. The encounter changed Mühling’s life, triggering a number of journeys to Ukraine and deep into the Russian heartland on a quest for stories of ordinary and extraordinary people. Away from the bright lights of Moscow, Mühling met and befriended a Dostoevskian cast of characters, including a hermit from Tayga who had only recently discovered the existence of a world beyond the woods, a Ukrainian Cossack who defaced the statue of Lenin in central Kiev, and a priest who insisted on returning to Chernobyl to preach to the stubborn few determined to remain in the exclusion zone.

Unveiling a portion of the world whose contradictions, attractions, and absurdities are still largely unknown to people outside its borders, A Journey into Russia is a much-needed glimpse into one of today’s most significant regions.

A timeless study of a man who revolutionized the literary landscape.

James Joyce (1882–1941) is hailed as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Rejecting his homeland and its religion as a young man, Joyce went on to reinvent the Dublin of his youth in his fiction. His masterpiece, Ulysses—once banned in Britain and the United States—redefined the modern novel and has become a canonical classic. Finnegans Wake, written as Joyce’s eyesight deteriorated, cemented his legacy as one of the founding figures of modernist literature.

In a revised edition of this lucid and compelling biography, containing a new foreword from the author, crucial events in Joyce’s life, from his self-imposed exile to his creative triumphs, are explored vividly. Ian Pindar reveals how Joyce’s work carefully blends the abstract and the mundane, capturing the great human comedy of which we are all part.