The Hamlet Called America

Overview

In The Hamlet Called America, Khrystia Vengryniuk has brilliantly rendered a mostly isolated village—full of eccentric characters living, loving, and losing together—and in doing so has created an astounding metaphor for the pitfalls of contemporary national isolationism, which speaks directly to the fraught political culture plaguing not only the United States, but the whole world.

Reviews

"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 and Death and the Penguin

"Khrystia Vengryniuk treats her characters with admirable compassion and warmth. Her story, paradoxically, induces a constant feeling of otherworldliness and timelessness, while also being very realistic in its details. She amazingly switches narration voices, from poetic to vernacular to philosophical to humorous and beyond. The Hamlet Called America is a novel that lingers in the reader's mind." —Artem Chapeye, author of The Weathering and Ordinary People Don't Carry Machine Guns

“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

Author Biography

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 The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harpers, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Apofenie. 

Khrystia Vengryniuk is an award-winning writer, literary critic, and painter from Chernivtsi. She is the author of the novel The Hamlet Called America, 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 words have 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. His co-translation with Kate Tsurkan of Oleh Sentsov’s Diary of a Hunger Striker was published by Deep Vellum in 2024.