Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn't mean he's grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha's anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.Marian Schwartz's new English translation of Envy brilliantly captures the energy of Olesha's masterpiece.A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

    There, a boy called Peekay is born. His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives heroic dreams, which are nothing compared to what life actually has in store for him. He embarks on an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice where he will learn the power of words, the power to transform lives and the power of one.

    . . by far Shaw's best work . . . it's all fascinating". Don't forget to stock up on this six-million-copy bestseller.

    Considered a failure by his superiors, he is sent to China to maintain a mission amid desperate poverty, civil war, plague, and the hostility of his superiors. In the face of this constant danger and hardship, Father Chisholm finds the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Recognized as A. J. Cronin’s best novel, The Keys of the Kingdom is an enthralling, fast-moving, colorful tale of a deeply spiritual man called to do good in an imperfect world.

    His friends and foes know him only as the Scarlet Pimpernel. But the ruthless French agent Chauvelin is sworn to discover his identity and to hunt him down.

    As the other man lies dying, the young soldier takes his horse and rides away. Years later, as a grown man in Paris whose life is still haunted by the murder he committed all that time ago, he comes across a story by a writer calling himself "Alexander Wolf", which recounts in astonishing detail the events of that day in 1919 from the dying victim's point of view. As he attempts to find the elusive writer, the narrator becomes involved in a series of strange encounters that lead him to question life, death and his own identity.Originally published in Russian in 1947-8 in the Russian-language New York periodical The New Review, and published now by Pushkin Press in its first new English translation since 1950, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is an early postmodern classic that stands alongside the best work by Vladimir Nabokov and Paul Auster.

    Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 550 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

    In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later.

    "We must not aggravate, but ease the last moments of our son," resolved the colonel firmly, and he carefully weighed every possible phase of the conversation, every act and movement that might take place on the following day. But somehow he became confused, forgetting what he had prepared, and he wept bitterly in the corner of the oilcloth-covered couch. In the morning he explained to his wife how she should behave at the meeting.

    Alexey Tolstoy (who was not related to the author of War and Peace) began to study the character of his hero, Peter the First, in 1917. When he died almost thirty years later, Tolstoy was still working on his masterpiece, this huge historical canvas which gives brilliant life and meaning to a crucial period in Russian history. Tolstoy reanimates the past by a succession of character creations which range from the serf, Ivan Brodkin, to Peter's sinister and opportunistic favorite, Alexander Menshikoff; from the old Boyars shorn of their beards and their prerogatives to the foreign captains of the new Russian navy. Here in these pages are the beautiful Anna Mons, Peter's first mistress; his wife Eudoxia, whom he never loved; and the peasant girl who eventually was to be crowned Empress Catherine the First. We see these men and women moving across a tapestry of battles abroad, and amid the dark, opulent luxury of the great families and the Imperial Court. In Tolstoy's moving crowded pages we see the emergence of Russia, thrust forward by Peter's inexorable will, from a backward medieval state to her final position as one of the great powers of Europe. Here are magnificent portraits, the fruits of years of historical research, of Peter's principal opponents: August, Elector of Saxony, indefatigable in his amusements, and King Charles XII of Sweden, a great military genius, flawed by passion and indulgence. But the true hero of Tolstoy's epic is Peter himself. We see him grow to be a man---awkward, suspicious, prone to spasms of cowardice, but always driving, sometimes provoked almost to madness, to free his country from the chains of backwardness and superstition to take her place as an equal among the nations of the west. And in the last analysis it is this greatness and originality of character in its hero which gives the stamp of greatness to the book itself. Alexey Tolstoy was born in 1883. In 1918 he published his first full length work, Nikita's Childhood. In 1919 he fled from the Bolshevik government and settled in Paris. In 1922 he asked for and received permission to return home. For the next twenty-four years he lived in Russia, until his death in 1946.

    The time is World War II. The family is the Macauley's -- a mother, sister, and three brothers whose struggles and dreams reflect those of America's second-generation immigrants.. In particular, fourteen-year-old Homer, determined to become one of the fastest telegraph messengers in the West, finds himself caught between reality and illusion as delivering his messages of wartime death, love, and money brings him face-to-face with human emotion at its most naked and raw. Gentle, poignant and richly autobiographical, this delightful novel shows us the boy becoming the man in a world that even in the midst of war, appears sweeter, safer and more livable than out own.

    There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry. One of the great classic novels of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

    From the acclaimed author who enthralled the world with Exodus, Battle Cry, QB VII, Topaz, and other beloved classics of twentieth-century fiction comes a sweeping and powerful epic adventure that captures the "terrible beauty" of Ireland during its long and bloody struggle for freedom. It is the electrifying story of an idealistic young Catholic rebel and the valiant and beautiful Protestant girl who defied her heritage to join his cause. It is a tale of love and danger, of triumph at an unthinkable cost—a magnificent portrait of a people divided by class, faith, and prejudice—an unforgettable saga of the fires that devastated a majestic land... and the unquenchable flames that burn in the human heart.

    In short segments, featuring love, loss, cannibalism, and yes, cynicism, this novella tells the story of a group young people in the middle of revolution-torn Russia, between 1918-1924.

    His philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light, and three separate efforts to print different collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Not until 1989 could these surreal fictions begin to be published. His collection of stories, Memories of the Future, is available from NYRB Classics.   Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.   Joanne Turnbull has translated a number of books from Russian, including Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future, which was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award (available as a NYRB Classic). Editorial Reviews - The Letter Killers Club From the Publisher A New York Review Books Original Writers are professional killers of conceptions. The logic of the Letter Killers Club, a secret society of “conceivers” who commit nothing to paper on principle, is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday they meet in a fire-lit room hung with blank black bookshelves to present their “pure and unsubstantiated” conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a medieval merry cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men’s minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. The overarching scene of this short novel is set in Soviet Moscow, in the ominous 1920s. Known only by pseudonym, like Chesterton’s anarchists in fin-de-siècle London, the Letter Killers are as mistrustful of one another as they are mesmerized by their despotic president. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is at his philosophical and fantastical best in this extended meditation on madness.