Half The List Of Ships

Clouds like white whales -- or zeppelins, if you will, in the way of an uncomplicated jocular reference, considering the specific locale under discussion. Countless, they stand immovably above your head, as if watching you, coldly, dispassionately. The Baltic sky -- a gelled reflection of itself in the sea below -- is unlike any other you'll ever see. There is no way to describe it with any greater specificity. In a country too small to define its various geographic regions in terms of the old compass points, that skyful of infinite cloud count is a country unto itself. One could say, at the risk of sounding somewhat excessively literary (but then again, why not), that the said metaphoric land of the immovable white clouds above is where the dead, and especially those unjustly killed in great numbers, dwell in uneasy peace. Those discrete dispassionate white clouds above your head: they make you feel vulnerable, somehow -- and vaguely guilty, too, for being alive -- as you near the large village/small town o

*This episode originally aired as Cosmonauts Avenue podcast #8 in March 2015* Binyavanga Wainaina is one of Africa's and the world's most recognized literary figures. He is a highly accomplished and multi-award-winning author, editor, publisher and journalist. He rose to prominence after his short story "Discovering Home" won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, after which he founded the influential literary magazine Kwani? - the first of its kind in East Africa. Following the renown of his 2003 satirical essay "How to Write About Africa," he was given an award by the Kenya Publisher's Association for his contributions to Kenyan literature. From 2008-2012 he was a Bard Fellow and Director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature. His debut novel "One Day I Will Write About This Place" was published in 2011. In April 2014, Time Magazine named him one of the World's 100 Most Influential People.

*This episode is in Russian.* Sergey Gandlevsky is widely considered to be one of the most influential and eminent Russian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first century. A graduate of Moscow State University, Gandlevsky was a member of the 1970s group of poets “Moscow Time.” He began publishing his poems in the 1980s and today is one of the most published Russian poets in the world. He has received numerous Russian and international literary awards, including the anti-Booker Prize in 1996. He has released several books including a bilingual edition of his poems, A Kindred Orphanhood.