“I remember as a child, around the age of seven or eight, asking my parents how many wars there had been. For some reason it was up to me to find out . . . At the time, I had no doubt that they could all be counted.”

From his family home in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, Roman Malynovsky offers some thoughts on language and war. Translated from the Ukrainian by Kate Tsurkan.

[“Count the Wars“]

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Roman Malynovsky is a writer and publisher from Ivano-Frankivsk. In 2017, he founded the Civilization publishing house. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Library of Babel publishing house, which he co-founded in 2014. His first short story collection, Sweet Life (‘Солодке життя’), was published by Meridian Czernowitz in 2021. His work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar Ukraine, Versopolis, and Akcent.

Kate Tsurkan is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Apofenie Magazine, TAULT translator and board member, and PhD candidate at New York University. Her written work has previously appeared in the New Statesman, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, the Calvert Journal, and Arrowsmith Press Journal.