Her privileged world is radically changed by Alexander I's emancipation of the serfs. Vera first hopes to follow in the footsteps of Christian martyrs, but a neighboring landowner--a liberal professor fired from his position at Saint Petersburg University and exiled to his estate--opens her eyes to the injustice in Russia.A blend of social commentary and psychological observation, Nihilist Girl depicts the clash between a generation of youth who find their lives caught up by political action and a society unwilling to abandon its patriarchal traditions.

    I was born into Russian; transposed into Czech, then German; introduced to Hebrew; and finally adopted by English.' Elena Lappin was born in Russia. Her parents speak Russian to one another, and to their children. Elena speaks Czech to her brother, but he writes in German and she writes in English. What does it mean to be brought up in family that speaks several different languages, and where all members are writers? Elena Lappin explores what it is to be a writer, what language is, and it's also a wonderful look at the life of a woman who has moved from country to country looking for a language to think in.

    By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is - just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

    Never having been awarded the Nobel Prize, which his readers worldwide believed he deserved, this story writer, poet, essayist, and man of letters died at age eighty-six.This anthology of interviews with him features more than a dozen conversations that cover all phases of his life and work.Conducted between 1964 and 1984, the interviews reveal Borges to be a remarkably candid, humorous man, by turns skeptical and enthusiastic, and always a singularly incisive and adventurous thinker.He discusses his blindness, his family and childhood, early travels, literary friends, and struggles to find his literary identity. In depth he examines the meanings and intentions of his own famous stories and poems, and he speaks of the writers whose works he has loved-Dante, Cervantes, Emerson, Dickinson, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Stevenson, Kipling, Whitman, Frost, and Faulkner-and of those whom he disliked, such as Hemingway and Lorca. Borges expresses his contempt for P ron and assesses the tumultuous politics of Argentina. He speaks also of the imagination as a type of dreaming, about issues of collaboration and translation, about philosophy, and about time.Many of the interviews were conducted by notable figures, including Alastair Reid, Willis Barnstone, and Ronald Christ.As Borges speaks in these conversations, readers who have fallen under the spell of his magical prose and poetry will find additional sustenance.Richard Burgin's books include the story collections "Feat of Blue Skies," "Private Fame," and "Man without Memory." In his first book on Borges, "Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges" (now out of print), he was the sole interviewer. Burgin is the editor of "Boulevard" magazine and an associate professor of communication and English at Saint Louis University.

    For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing—a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing, and writing about other writers. What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a strident call to arms, and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.

    This fascinating new selection tells Chekhov's story as a man and a writer through affectionate bulletins to his family, insightful discussions of literature with publishers and theater directors, and tender love letters to his actress wife. Vividly evoking landscapes, people, and his day to day life, the letters offer revealing glimpses into Chekhov's preoccupations-the onset of tuberculosis, his dual careers as doctor and writer, and his ambivalence about his growing reputation as Russia's foremost playwright and author. This volume takes us inside the mind of one of the world's greatest writers, and the character that emerges from these pages is resilient, generous, charming, and life enhancing.

    Through his own lively and eloquent reminiscences, "Stepping Stones "retraces the poet's steps from his first exploratory testing of the ground as an infant to what he called his "moon-walk" to the podium to receive the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. It also fascinatingly charts his post-Nobel life and is supplemented with a number of photographs, many from the Heaney family album and published here for the first time. In response to firm but subtle questioning from Dennis O'Driscoll, Heaney sheds a personal light on his work (poems, essays, translations, plays) and on the artistic and ethical challenges he faced during the dark years of the Ulster Troubles. Combining the spontaneity of animated conversation with the considered qualities of the best autobiographical writing, "Stepping Stones "provides an original, diverting, and absorbing store of reflections and recollections. Scholars and general readers alike are brought closer to the work, life, and creative development of a charismatic and lavishly gifted poet whose latest collection, "District and Circle," was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2007.

    V. Belov and V. A. Tunimanov. They have carried Grossman’s work further by rearranging the manuscript into twelve broad chapters in chronological sequence, corresponding to the most important periods in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s family. This necessitated some transposition of material to where it chronologically belonged, as well as the elimination of certain redundant episodes left in the Grossman edition. Belov and Tunimanov also added, as a first chapter, Anna Grigoryevna’s description of her childhood and youth and the milieu in which her extraordinary character was formed. In the book’s last chapter, “After Dostoevsky’s Death,” they retained Anna Grigoryevna’s “Answer to Strakhov” and added to it her description of her only meeting with Leo Tolstoy, not included in the Grossman edition. To this chapter the translator of the present edition has also restored the brief section “Memoirists,” omitted from the second Russian edition.

    In Sculpting in Time, he has left his artistic testament, a remarkable revelation of both his life and work. Since Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, the visionary quality and totally original and haunting imagery of Tarkovsky's films have captivated serious movie audiences all over the world, who see in his work a continuation of the great literary traditions of nineteenth-century Russia. Many critics have tried to interpret his intensely personal vision, but he himself always remained inaccessible.In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky sets down his thoughts and his memories, revealing for the first time the original inspirations for his extraordinary films--Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublyov, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice. He discusses their history and his methods of work, he explores the many problems of visual creativity, and he sets forth the deeply autobiographical content of part of his oeuvre--most fascinatingly in The Mirror and Nostalgia. The closing chapter on The Sacrifice, dictated in the last weeks of Tarkovsky's life, makes the book essential reading for those who already know or who are just discovering his magnificent work.

    Includes many poems used in Arseny's son's films (Andrei Tarkovsky). With a bibliography of both Arseny and Andrei Tarkovsky, and illustrations from Tarkovsky's movies.FROM THE INTRODUCTION:Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky was was born in June 1907 in Elizavetgrad, later named Kirovograd. He studied at the Academy of Literature in Moscow from 1925 to 1929, and also worked in the editorial office of the journal Gudok. He was well respected as a translator, especially of the Oriental classics, but was little known as a poet for most of his life, being unable to get any of his own work published during the Stalinist era. His poems did not begin to appear in book form until he was over fifty. His son, the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, made extensive use of his father's in some of his films, and certain of his diary entries indicate the esteem in which the poet was held in the Soviet Union towards the end of his life. An entry written after Andrei had given a talk at the Moscow Physical Institute in 1980, for instance, reproduces the following note from a member of the audience: 'An enormous number of people in this hall admire Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky as a great Russian poet. Please convey our respects to him.' One of the few recorded public appearances of Arseny Tarkovsky was at the funeral of Anna Akhmatova; he was one of three writers deputed to accompany her coffin from Domodedovo to Leningrad, and he read both at her funeral in Komarovo and at the first evening held in her memory in Moscow. He died in 1989 and is now beginning to be recognised as one of the many significant Russian poets of the twentieth century.From Ignatyevo Forest'The last leaves' embers in total immolationRise into the sky; this whole forestSeethes with irritation, just as we didThat last year we lived together.

    Their first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, transformed their story of literary ambition into one of the great legends of the 19th century, a dramatic tale of three lonely sisters playing out their tragic destiny on top of a windswept moor. Lucasta Miller reveals where this image came from and how it took such a hold on the popular imagination.Each generation has rewritten the Brontës to reflect changing attitudes - towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. The Brontë Myth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture. It is a witty, erudite and refreshingly unsentimental unravelling of what Henry James described as "the most complete intellectual muddle ever achieved on a literary question by our wonderful public."

    With some of these stories appearing here in book form for the very first time, and others previously unavailable for decades, Short Fiction is a welcome gift for every Flann O'Brien fan worldwide.

         From the beloved and best-selling author of The Snowman comes his first book in ten years: a charming and beautifully illustrated work for adults. In Notes from the Sofa, Raymond Briggs traces the course of his life in a series of wonderfully observed vignettes that take him from the awkwardness and embarrassment of growing up to the vicissitudes and frustrations of growing old.      This collection features the best pieces from Briggs' regular column -- 'Notes from the Sofa' -- in The Oldie, Richard Ingrams' humorous monthly magazine. Amusing and touching by turn, these include his unwavering dedication to the arts and why he takes pleasure in being labelled a 'creative sociopath'; amusing anecdotes, such as how he became an accidental Winnie the Pooh tour guide to Japanese tourists; and general musings on life, including his confusion as a young child as to exactly where babies come from.      This is Briggs like you've never read him before, with a newfound freedom to write and draw about whatever he wants, without the restrictions of children's books and sometimes without the happy endings.

    In these pieces, he discusses Swedish politics, brain surgery, Laurie Anderson, Edvard Munch, the Northern Lights, and the work of an array of writers and visual artists (paired with full color images of their art). These essays beautifully capture Knausgaard’s ability to mediate between the deeply personal and the universal, demonstrating his trademark self-scrutiny and his deep longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.

    It was 53 years since the day she'd been forced to flee. In part, this is the remarkable story of what she found, the account of a woman coming face-to-face with her own past. But it is also the reconstruction of a world which vanished in 1939 when Soviet tanks rolled into eastern Poland.