Stalking the Atomic City

Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl

Markiyan Kamysh, Hanna Leliv, Reilly Costigan-Humes

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English

Pushkin Press
05 October 2022

Memoirs; Travel & holiday

'A voice that must be heard' - Patti Smith

For many, the 1,000-square-mile Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is a symbol of total disaster: a reminder of the day thousands of lives were shattered, now a toxic no-man's-land. For Markiyan Kamysh, it is a place to relax.

He and dozens like him call themselves 'stalkers': wild adventurers who sneak past border patrols and police to spend days exploring the desolate corners of abandoned villages and settlements. In Stalking the Atomic City, Kamysh, the son of a Chornobyl disaster liquidator, invites us into this alien world.

In electric prose that captures the spectral beauty of the Zone and the reckless spirit of the stalkers, Kamysh tells of hallucinatory days alone in the rusted ruins, of panicked brushes with police and moments of ecstatic celebration in the wasteland. A breathless account of danger and freedom, Stalking the Atomic City is a captivating insider look at a unique subculture.

'An existential travel guide and an experiment in gonzo psychogeography, it stirs obvious comparisons with Hunter S Thompson... mesmerising' - Telegraph 'Blunt, bare, ecstatic... [Stalking the Atomic City] has a rare quality of revelation about it and hums with a kind of exhaustedly beautiful intensity.' - Quietus

By: Markiyan Kamysh
Translated by: Hanna Leliv, Reilly Costigan-Humes
Imprint: Pushkin Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm,
ISBN: 9781782278559
ISBN 10: 1782278559
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 05 October 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Markiyan Kamysh is a Ukrainian writer who represents the Chornobyl underground in literature. Since 2010, he has illegally explored the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. He is the son of a Chornobyl liquidator, nuclear physicist and design engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv who died in 2003. Stalking the Atomic City, his first book, has been translated into multiple languages and published to great acclaim. He lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. See more photos on his Instagram @markiyankamysh.

Reviews for Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl

'An existential travel guide and an experiment in gonzo psychogeography, it stirs obvious comparisons with Hunter S Thompson... mesmerising' - Telegraph 'Not since Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano have I been so enthralled by such a poetic rush to madness. But that was fiction: Markiyan Kamysh's epic immersion in this dread symbol of humanity's self-inflicted undoing is shockingly real, recounted in a stunning, original voice as lyrical as it is unnerving' - Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us 'Stark, surreal... A visceral, graphic report from dystopia' - Kirkus Reviews