Showcase of Novelties at the Book Arsenal: publishers presented almost 1300 books

For the international Book Arsenal festival, Ukrainian publishers presented almost 1300 new books that were published during the year. You can find them in the section “Showcase of Novelties – The Year of Sustainability” on the website of the Chytomo cultural and publishing project.

The books were provided by 77 Ukrainian publishers. Vivat, Ranok, The Old Lion Publishing House, and the Family Leisure Club gave the majority of books. This year, a publishing house established during the war, Bearded Tamarin, also participated in the showcase.

“During the first year of the full-scale war, we, as media, recorded the changes that were taking place in the country’s book publishing market. Despite the rocket attacks on printing houses, bookstores, and warehouses, despite the fact that publishing house employees went to the front, went abroad, or to another region of Ukraine, the industry demonstrates an amazing ability to adapt and resist. And our Showcase of Novelties, the number and quality of titles in it, confirms this. The russians destroyed tons of warehouses and libraries of Ukrainian books, but publishers will be able to fill them again, and not with books with russian or Soviet narratives. But also with books about this war, dozens of which have been published in the past year. Our task is to buy them, read them, and support publishers in this way,” believes Oksana Khmelovska, editor-in-chief of the Chytomo website.

The largest number of books is in the categories of Ukrainian fiction, non-fiction, foreign fiction, and children’s game books.

Compared to the previous year, the number of publications in the categories “Children’s prose and poetry” and ” Young adult literature” decreased, but the number of publications in the section “Books about the war” increased. The categories of “Art books”, “Graphic novels”, and “Poetry” remained virtually unchanged. In total, you can find new books in 11 categories.

“Despite the fact that the Book Arsenal festival is held in a smaller format and without publishers’ stands for obvious reasons, the Showcase of Novelties will demonstrate all the achievements of the industry, as it will be presented in the arsenal space. As in previous years, visitors of the festival will be able to look through the new releases, and some of them will be available for the first time, as they will come straight from the printing houses. In addition, visitors will be able to create their own wish list to use later to make a purchase on the publishers’ websites or in bookstores, which have opened many in Ukraine over the past year,” says Anastasia Zahorui, project coordinator.

The Showcase also features selections of noteworthy books prepared by Ukrainian literary critics Tetiana Petrenko, Anastasia Herasymova, and Tetiana Trofymenko, and will be updated in the near future. Readers can also use the recommendations of the Chytomo team.

This year’s showcase has several innovations:

• artificial intelligence will tell you which book you should read;
• it is now possible to generate an individual wish list with books: readers can mark the publications they like and later compile them into one document. This will allow you to come to the Book Arsenal 2023 with a ready-made wish list.

The Showcase of Novelties is an annual special project of Chytomo, which presents titles released by publishers during a certain period of time before the Book Arsenal or Book Forum festivals. Its main goal is to help readers learn about all the outstanding new releases and decide on future purchases, as well as to support Ukrainian publishers.

The showcase will be located in section A of the Book Arsenal.

The project is being implemented in 2023 thanks to the support of the ЗMIN Foundation.

As a reminder, over six months in 2022, 270 new products from 48 publishers were presented at the Showcase.

As you know, the 11th International Book Arsenal Festival in 2023 will take place from the evening of June 22 (official opening) to June 25. The focus theme of this year’s Arsenal is When Everything Matters.

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