Noon on January 20th—Inauguration Day—is only hours away. A flaw in the Constitution, and an even more flawed presidential succession act, have opened the door to disaster and Zorin intends to exploit both weaknesses to their fullest.Armed with a weapon leftover from the Cold War, one long thought to be just a myth, Zorin plans to attack. He’s aided by a shocking secret hidden in the archives of America’s oldest fraternal organization—the Society of Cincinnati—a group that once lent out its military savvy to presidents, including helping to formulate three invasion plans of what was intended to be America’s 14th colony—Canada.In a race against the clock that starts in the frozen extremes of Russia and ultimately ends at the White House itself, Malone must not only battle Zorin, he must also confront a crippling fear that he’s long denied, but which now jeopardizes everything. Steve Berry’s trademark mix of history and speculation is all here in this provocative new thriller.

    Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.

    Most of the novella, told in the third person, relates incidents from the life of Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov. These portions alternate with short chapters told by an unidentified narrator who once knew Glebov.

    K. Tolstoy was above all poet; but he also wrote a historical novel from the time of Ivan The Terrible, Prince Serebryani, which had a great success, partly because in it for the first time censorship had permitted fiction to deal with the half-mad Tsar who played the part of Louis XI. of the Russian Monarchy, but especially on account of its qualities as a historical novel.

    Wilson narrates the complex drama of the writer's life: his childhood of aristocratic privilege but emotional deprivation, his discovery of his literary genius after aimless years of gambling and womanizing, and his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy's works were the exact mirror of his life, and instead traces the roots of Tolstoy's art to his relationship with God, with women, and with Russia. He also breaks new ground in recreating the world that shaped the great novelist's life and art--the turmoil of ideas and politics in nineteenth-century Russia and the incredible literary renaissance that made Tolstoy's work possible. 24 pages of illustrations.

    Pearce sets out to challenge this typical media typecasting: Solzhenitsyn as "paradox personified: the pessimistic optimist." He shows how Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith brought him to the truth that shines so clearly in all his writing: that "creeping knowledge that human history may be little more than a long defeat in a land of exile. Yet such a defeat, however long, is rooted in time: temporal and therefore temporary." Among the features of this major new biography are exclusive personal interviews with Solzhenitsyn, previously unpublished poetry, a rare photo gallery, and a focus on the rich faith dimension of this Nobel Prize winner's life. Any new student of Solzhenitsyn should start with this book.

    Yes, I am well.... It would be better if I were ill, it's worse as it is. A dream keeps creeping into my mind, and I cannot get away from it. I try to think--I can't collect my thoughts, I try to pray--but I can't get free by prayer. My lips murmur the words but my heart is far away; as though the evil one were whispering in my ear, and always of such wicked things. And such thoughts rise up within me, that I'm ashamed of myself. What is wrong with me? There's some trouble, something before me! At night I do not sleep, Varia, a sort of murmur haunts me; someone seems speaking so tenderly to me, as it were cooing to me like a dove.

    Petersburg in 1914 amid an international chess tournament and a series of mysterious murders. Zugzwang unfolds in a city on the verge of revolution. On a blustery April day, a respected St. Petersburg newspaper editor is murdered in front of a shocked crowd. Five days later, Dr. Otto Spethmann, the celebrated psychoanalyst, receives a visit from the police. There has been another murder in the city—and somehow he is implicated. The doctor is mystified and deeply worried, as much for his young, spirited daughter as for himself.Meanwhile, he finds himself preoccupied by two new patients: Anna Petrovna, a society beauty plagued with nightmares with whom he is inappropriately falling in love, and the troubled genius Rozental, a brilliant but fragile chess master on the verge of a complete breakdown. As Dr. Spethmann is drawn deeper into the murderous intrigue, he finds that he, his patients, and his daughter may all be pawns in a game larger in scope than anything he could have imagined. Punctuated with board-by-board illustrations of a chess match that plays out through the book, Zugzwang is a masterfully written novel packed with cliffhangers, romance, unforgettable characters, and a plot that keeps readers guessing to the very end.

    Included are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature - including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn - alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully wide-ranging and exciting representation of one of the most vital and enduring forms of Russian literature.

    Failing to gain recognition for his music in his native United States, he achieved celebrity in South America in the early 1960s and then, unbelievably, became the biggest rock star in the Soviet Union, where he was awarded the Lenin Prize and his icons were sold alongside those of Josef Stalin. His albums went gold from Bulgaria to Berlin. He made highly successful movies and, naively earnest, was an unwitting acolyte for socialism; everywhere he went, he was mobbed by his fans. And then, in 1986, at the height of his fame, right after 60 Minutes had devoted a segment to him, finally giving him the recognition he had never attained at home, he drowned in mysterious circumstances in East Berlin.Drawn magnetically to his story, Reggie Nadelson pursued the mystery of Dean Reed's life and death across America and Eastern Europe, her own journey mirroring his. As she traveled, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union crumbled, and Reed became an increasingly alluring figure, his life an unrepeatable tale of the Cold War world. Encountering the characters— musicians and DJs, politicians and public figures, lovers and wives—who peopled Reed's life, Nadelson was drawn further and further into a seedy, often hilarious subculture of sex, politics, and rock 'n' roll. Part biography, part memoir and personal journey, Comrade Rockstar is an unforgettable chronicle of an utterly improbable life

    More men died in the Crimean War than in the American Civil War which followed soon after, but while the Civil War has been the subject of countless books, articles, and movies, the Crimean War has been virtually ignored.Part of the reason for this is that the causes of the Crimean War are not well understood. Just what made four empires go to war in the Black Sea in 1854? The outcome of the war was also partly responsible; it can be argued that the Crimean War changed nothing and that it is not at all clear why and for what half a million men died. Even the name by which this war is now known was not used at the time; until the twentieth century, this war was known in Britain as the Russian War.Yet the Crimean War is important for a number of reasons. Although it did not change the map of Europe and did not directly cause the fall of any of the combatants, it did indirectly shape the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century in Europe. This war also introduced newspaper reporters and photographers who provided regular dispatches direct from the battlefield, something that became a feature of virtually every war which followed. The presence of these reporters gave the public some idea, almost for the first time, of what war was really like for the men who fought it.Although the Crimean War did not fundamentally change the world, nothing would be quite the same after its conclusion. This is the story of the Crimean War.Discover a plethora of topics such asThe March to WarThe Charge of the Light BrigadeDeath, Disease, and the Lady with the LampInkerman and the Death of the TsarThe Naval WarThe Fall of SevastopolAnd much more!

    Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet, drink, read, brawl, celebrate, and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence “Twelve”; that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone. Boris Pasternak was also of this company, putting together his great youthful hymn to nature, My Sister, Life. It was a transforming moment—not just for Russian but for world poetry—but a short-lived one. Within little more than a decade, revolution and terror were to disperse, silence, and destroy almost all the poets of the Stray Dog cabaret.

    But her greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows.Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. Together these first humans become parents to two whales, and then to mankind. Even after Reu dies, Nau continues on, sharing her story of brotherhood between the two species. But as these origins grow more distant, the old woman's tales are subsumed into myth--and her descendants turn increasingly bent on parading their dominance over the natural world.Buoyantly translated into English for the first time by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, this new entry in the Seedbank series is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi, a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego--and another unforgettable work of fiction from Yuri Rytkheu, "arguably the foremost writer to emerge from the minority peoples of Russia's far north" (New York Review of Books).