The new capital of the legitimate government of Russia, once a trading post in the far east, is now a fast-growing boom town. Into this maelstrom come peddlers and exotic dancers, criminals and craftsmen, nobles and assassins. Crime is running rampant and the city guards that passes for policemen don't have a clue how to handle it—and wouldn’t know a clue if they stumbled right over it. They can manage to walk a beat, at least in broad daylight. But solve a crime?         Not a chance. And Czar Michael Romanov and his officials aren’t any help, since they’re pre-occupied with building a nation out of spit and bailing wire.          But the bargirl who was murdered had friends who cared. And thosefriends call in Vasilii Lyapuno, an engineer working at the newly-founded Dacha in Ufa and loves up-timer murder mysteries.          Can Vasilii track down the killer? Luckily for him, he has the assistance of another bargirl named Miroslava, who has a unique way of seeing the world. Together they might figure out who did what to whom and who was responsible for the crime.         Crimes, rather. Murder starts adding up.

    Oligarchs and oil barons may still dominate international news coverage, but their prosperity masks a deep-rooted demographic tragedy. Faced with staggering population decline—and near-certain economic collapse—driven by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, Russia is also battling a deeper sickness: a spiritual one, born out of the country’s long totalitarian experiment. In The Last Man in Russia, award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough uses the tale of a lone priest to give life to this national crisis. Father Dmitry Dudko, a dissident Orthodox Christian, was thrown into a Stalinist labor camp for writing poetry. Undaunted, on his release in the mid-1950s he began to preach to congregations across Russia with little concern for his own safety. At a time when the Soviet government denied its subjects the prospect of advancement, and turned friend against friend and brother against brother, Dudko urged his followers to cling to hope. He maintained a circle of sacred trust at the heart of one of history’s most deceitful systems. But as Bullough reveals, this courageous group of believers was eventually shattered by a terrible act of betrayal—one that exposes the full extent of the Communist tragedy. Still, Dudko’s dream endures. Although most Russians have forgotten the man himself, the embers of hope that survived the darkness are once more beginning to burn. Leading readers from a churchyard in Moscow to the snow-blanketed ghost towns of rural Russia, and from the forgotten graves of Stalin’s victims to a rock festival in an old gulag camp, The Last Man in Russia is at once a travelogue, a sociological study, a biography, and a cri de coeur for a dying nation—one that, Bullough shows, might yet be saved.

    Knowing little of the red tape, cultural differences and climate ahead, Matthew sets off alone across the North Sea bound for Shanghai. Trans-Siberian Adventures follows his exploits as he learns the ropes of becoming a long-range train adventurer. This is a captivating insight into the reality of life on the legendary Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian railways.

    "Hermit and Six Toes"; "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream"; "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII"; and "Tai Shou Chuan USSR" are four characterstic stories by the young Russian virtuoso Victor Pelevin, here collected in a New Directions Bibelot edition. With a deadpan and cooly ironic voice that speaks of the phantasmagorical, the surreal, the grotesque and the absurd just as affectingly as Gogol did in his day, Victor Pelevin writes of the dark chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a man walks through a city at night with a companion he isn't entirely sure isn't his own shadow. This slim volume offers first-time Pelevin readers a compelling taste of his bleakly comic genius.

    As soon as I’m alone in the woods, I can sense his eyes watching me as I get drunk on something else, his animal charge which fills the air between us.The Professor would be mad if I came back empty handed, but damn, if what I discover isn’t more of a distraction than bad weather, missing links or even avalanches.NikolaiThirty years ago, the forest claimed me, it nearly killed me but it claimed me, gave me a new life from the one I thought I knew. I learned to live, to hunt and thrive in the wilderness, at one with nature and within the circle of life, but always missing that one thing all the other creatures had, that one thing they enjoyed at least once every spring season.A mate.As soon as I see her, I know she’s been sent for me, sent for me to claim and to breed.To claim as my own.But she brings something else with her, the memory from a dream.Am I a man, or a monster?I want to be her man, her mate. Together. Forever.*Russian Mountain Man is a SHORT insta-everything standalone instalove romance with an HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

    

    While inspired by the sense of spiritual certainty, their narrative quality, subtle humor, and visionary power lift them far above the common run of "religious" literature.

    His novels, among them Rudin (1856), Fathers and Sons (1862), and Virgin Soil (1877), and his many stories and plays pointedly reveal his opposition to the serf system and his profound insights into the lives, interests, and attitudes of the nobility and intelligentsia of mid-19th-century Russia.Two of Turgenev's best works of short fiction are the touching First Love (1860), a novella known to be partly autobiographical, and The Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850), a fascinating tale of an ineffectual Russian Hamlet. Both provide a superb introduction to the keen social perception, rich characterization, and narrative command of this Russian master. Both stories are presented here in acclaimed translations by Constance Garnett.

    Having given birth to daughter after daughter after daughter, she becomes desperate and turns to the first of her mystical advisors, Msgr. Philippe, who persuades her, among other things, that she is invisible.And then comes the moment of her greatest triumph with the birth of her son and the heir to the throne of all the Russias, the Tsarevich Alexei.All four volumes are (planned) as follows:1. 'The Funeral Bride' 1884-1894 - published November 20152. 'The Empress of Tears' 1895-1904 - published March 20163. 'The Pride of Eagles' 1905-1914 - to be published by November 20164. 'No Greater Crown' 1914-1918 - to be published by April 2017

    Marian Burleigh-Motley. When the original edition of this book was published, John Russell hailed it as a massive contribution to our knowledge of one of the most fascinating and mysterious episodes in the history of modern art. It still remains the most compact, accurate and reasonably priced survey of sixty years of creative dynamic activity that profoundly influenced the progress of Western art and architecture.

    The last finished work was The Young Guard, a similarly stern, truthful novel about the Great Patriotic War, the German occupation, the tragic and decisive year of 1942. The writer turned grey, stepped past the borders of thirty, forty and fifty years of age, but his own revolutionary youth was ever before him as a period of inestimable value which make him kin with the ideas of Bolshevism - and for that he was thankful to his youth and loved it. The fact that it was namely Fadeyev who in the fourth year of the Patriotic War began to write about the Komsomols of Krasnodon was no accident. The Tragedy of the events in Krasnodon did not disconcert him. On the contrary, it attracted him. The Rout was written when the Civil Was had ended victoriously; The Young Guard was written when the war was drawing to a victorious close. Fadeyev wanted to show the full force of what that cost and what qualities people must have in order ultimately to win in such a war, in order to win in the future no matter in what circumstances. There is no doubt that was the inner feeling with which The Young Guard was written.

    Krupskaya.

    Serge’s tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I, when the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain. Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge’s “tale of two cities” is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city “we” could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites. Between the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia’s dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. The novel was composed a decade after the revolution in Leningrad, where Serge was living in semicaptivity because of his declared opposition to Stalin’s dictatorship over the revolution.

    Baker practices astonishing verbal magic over and over again." - Clancy Martin, Paris Review"Strikingly intimate... Free of the stilted or formal locutions that clutter up some of the more antique-sounding translations... Ms. Baker has given the play a natural but distinctly contemporary American sound." - Charles Isherwood, New York Times"Devastatingly beautiful... People are going to be talking about this one for years." - Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Village Voice"More than a modern-dress treatment of a classic work, it's a fresh rethinking of the material from the perspective of a modern mind." - Marilyn Stasio, VarietyAnnie Baker, one of the most celebrated playwrights in the United States, lends her truthful observation and elegant command of the colloquial to Anton Chekhov's despairing masterpiece Uncle Vanya. A critical hit in its sold-out Off-Broadway premiere, Baker's telling is a refreshingly intimate and modern treatment of a Chekhovian classic.Annie Baker's plays include The Flick (The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Obie Award), The Aliens (Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award) and Body Awareness. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries internationally. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwright Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She is a resident playwright at the Signature Theatre.

    Stylish, intricate and sensuous, these five wickedly inventive stories are a rich combination of humour and horror: exploring questions of literature, love, madness and memory.