When the Whales Leave

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Product Details
Price
$14.00  $13.02
Publisher
Milkweed Editions
Publish Date
Pages
144
Dimensions
5.4 X 8.4 X 0.6 inches | 0.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781571311313

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About the Author
Yuri Rytkheu (1930-2008) was born in Uelen, a village in the Chukotka region of Siberia. He sailed the Bering Sea, worked on Arctic geological expeditions, and hunted in Arctic waters, in addition to writing over a dozen novels and collections of stories. The English translation of his book A Dream in Polar Fog was a Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize Notable Book in 2006. In the late 1950s, Rytkheu emerged not only as a great literary talent, but as the unique voice of a small national minority--the Chukchi people, a shrinking community residing in one of the most majestic and inhospitable environments on earth.

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse was born in Belarus and, together with her family, emigrated to the United States in 1989. She has translated the work of Dimitry Bortnikov, Sergey Gandlevsky, and Ilya Brazhnikov. Educated at Vassar College, Oxford University, and University College London, she now lives in London.
Reviews
Praise for Yuri Rytkheu

"Arguably the foremost writer to emerge from the minority peoples of Russia's far north."--New York Review of Books

"We have so little intimate information about these Arctic people, and the writer's deep emotional attachment to this landscape of ice (today melting away under global warming forces) makes every sentence seem a poetic revelation."--Annie Proulx

"Yuri Rytkheu comes from a Uelen Settlement of the Chukotsk National Territory in Siberia and carries with his work the voice of that vast and majestic landscape . . . It's sometimes hard to tell a fable from a fact these days, but in this case the fable states truths we shouldn't ignore, like where we descend from and the legacies we leave behind." --Literary Hub

"Rytkheu immerses his readers in the fantastical landscapes of the Arctic circle, and does so without breaking a sweat. . . . His elegant, unforced descriptive writing can whip us across leagues of tundra and thread the jagged icebergs studding hyperborean seas, but when the blizzards hit and the characters are trapped in their huts, we're snowbound there with them under the whale-oil lamp, chewing walrus and hoping for respite."--Bookslut

"Thousands of books have been written about the Arctic aborigines by intruders from the south. Rytkheu has turned the skin inside out and written about the way the Arctic people view outsiders. A Chukchi himself, [he] writes with passion, strength, and beauty of a world we others have never understood."--Farley Mowat