A room in the house of JEF

Authors Yuriy Tarnawsky

House author

Yuriy Tarnawsky

1934 2025

JEF Books was Yuriy Tarnawsky's primary English-language press, gathering fourteen titles including Warm Arctic Nights (2019) and the First-Person Dilogy.

The shelf

14 titles , published 2011 – 2025.

14 titles · 2011 – 2025 · all in print

The bio

On Yuriy Tarnawsky.

Yuriy Tarnawsky (1934-2025) was a Ukrainian-American poet, novelist, and translator who across roughly forty books, in both Ukrainian and English, became one of the central formal innovators in the postwar Ukrainian literary diaspora. Born in Turka, in what is now Lviv Oblast, he was displaced as a child during the Second World War, spent years in a displaced persons camp in Neu-Ulm, Germany, and emigrated with his father and siblings to the United States in 1952. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Newark College of Engineering in 1956 and later a Ph.D. in Linguistics from New York University in 1982, while spending 36 years as a researcher at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center working on early machine translation. From 1993 to 1996 he taught Ukrainian literature and culture at Columbia University.

In December 1958, with Bohdan Boychuk and his then-wife Patricia Nell Warren, he co-founded the New York Group, the émigré avant-garde collective whose annual almanac Novi Poeziji ran into the 1970s and changed the trajectory of modern Ukrainian poetry. His first English-language novel, Meningitis, appeared from Fiction Collective (FC2) in 1978; Three Blondes and Death followed from FC2 in 1993.

JEF Books became his primary English-language press in the 2010s and 2020s. The catalogue here gathers fourteen titles, including The Placebo Effect Trilogy (2007-2013), Warm Arctic Nights (2019), the First-Person Dilogy of Sebastian in a Dream (2023) and The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (2024), and the late Academe Grove: Interviews 2017-2023, Literary Diary 2020-2024, and Extractions: Selected Poems (September 2025).

In 2008 the Ukrainian government awarded him the Prince Yaroslav the Wise Order of Merit, Third Class. His work has appeared in French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, and Latvian translation. His papers are held at the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University.

Start with Warm Arctic Nights, the fictive memoir of a boy's wartime Ukrainian adolescence, the most direct entry into the voice and the world that the JEF stretch returned to.

From the editor

The first thing I remember about Yuriy is the shape of the manuscript. The pages were spare, but it was not minimalism. He was leaving out specific things in specific places, and the things he left out were making the things he kept harder to read past. He called the form the mininovel. Fifteen to forty pages each, and you could finish one in a sitting, and you could not put it down for a week afterwards. I said yes to the first manuscript. We worked together for eighteen years and fifteen books, from Like Blood in Water in 2007 to Extractions, which arrived three weeks before he died. He once wrote about my own writing that Gerdes is because he writes. He meant, I think, that the writing is the act in which the writer becomes. He was paying me the compliment of being read correctly by a peer. He was also describing himself.

Eckhard Gerdes · founding editor, JEF

If you have never read Yuriy

Start with Sebastian in a Dream.

Sebastian in a Dream is the first half of Tarnawsky's final dilogy, published the year before his death in October 2025. The structure is borrowed from Bach's Goldberg Variations: thirty variations bracketed by an aria stated at the opening and restated at the close. The narrator is a...

Take Sebastian in a Dream home · $16.00

Elsewhere on record

The authority trail.

For students, for librarians, for the next biographer. We do not embed; we link out.

Only Yuriy Tarnawsky, of all people on the face of this planet, could have written this work.

— Eckhard Gerdes