I make mistakes. I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best," and I couldn't agree more. Life is like a paradox of love and pain that may never leave each other, but in the end, the coexistence is worth the journey. Striving for the best is human nature, but are you really prepared for the roller-coaster rides or do you give up?

    On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol.

    Is there a plot here? Well, yes and no. Aksyonov (The Steel Bird, The Island of Crimea) offers a narrator/hero named Tolya von Steinbock – a quasi-autobiographical figure who is variously metamorphosed into a scientist, a jazz musician, a sculptor, a writer, a doctor. Through this flexible alter ego, then, Aksyonov can bring in everything – starting with memories of his own childhood in the Siberian prison-camp town of Magadan.

    In these stories, four writers—all exiles from revolutionary Russia—explore four deaths in a world in which old certainties have crumbled.

    Let her stories heal your heart and soul." (Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom)

    a gem of a novel' Robert Dinsdale Moscow, 1932. Gareth Jones, a young Welsh reporter, arrives in the Soviet Union excited to see for himself how Josef Stalin is forging a new civilisation. He meets American and British journalists who acclaim Stalin’s great experiment – but when Jones witnesses people starving to death in Ukraine, his belief in the Soviet revolution is shattered. He must decide whether to report the truth or become just another useful idiot, saying only what the Communist secret police allow and smothering the evidence of his own eyes. In this special kind of hell, anyone could be an informer, and Jones knows his life will be at risk if he is even thought to be defying Stalin. And when the woman he loves falls under the suspicion of the secret police, everything Jones values is in danger. Can he reveal the terrible truth about the Ukrainian famine to the world, or will he be silenced forever? THE USEFUL IDIOT is the secret history of the first great Soviet lie – wrapped up in an electrifying novel perfect for readers of Robert Harris, Ken Follett, Frederick Forsyth, John le Carré and Kate Atkinson. As Vladimir Putin rewrites the Nazi-Soviet pact and with the horrors of Chernobyl and the Cold War so recent, this thriller of fake news in 1932 is real storytelling of enormous significance. *** John Sweeney is an award-winning journalist and a former long-serving BBC reporter. He is the author of eleven books, including three novels: the 200,000-copy bestseller ELEPHANT MOON, another historical thriller based on true events, two modern-day political thrillers, COLD and ROAD, an investigation into the Church of Scientology, THE CHURCH OF FEAR, an account of his time spent undercover in North Korea, NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER. He tweets from @johnsweeneyroar.

    Wise men, alchemists and philosophers spend decades looking for this great secret. What would they say, if they discovered that the ultimate prize they so desperately pursued ended up falling into the hands of the least likely individual?

    The characters in Infidelities––soldiers and civilians alike––are caught in the ridiculous, often cruelly whimsical contradictions of war and the paranoia and folly of those who conduct it. In "Ribs," a Croatian woman whose husband has already been taken by the war will go to any length to keep her son out of the army, including sleeping with the draft officer, a tryst that leads to an unexpected, and disturbing, spiritual vision. A Buddhist soldier in the Bosnian Muslim military isly accused of being an informer to the enemy Serbs after his detachment ambushes itself in "Hail." A draft dodger is in the hospital for a transplant, in "A Purple Heart," when a high–ranking Croatian general steals the heart for himself (and dies) while the dodger suddenly discovers a new thirst for life. In "Spleen," a Bosnian émigré in America learns that even in the throes of passion she cannot find release from the haunting memories of her homeland.These stories cover a broad sweep of time, reaching back to the first shots of World War I in Sarajevo and forward to the plight of Balkan immigrants in contemporary America. Throughout, acts of compassion, gallows humour, even desire arise from a landscape devastated by tragedy.

    This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including Pale Horse, Pale Rider, where a young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her fiancé on his way to war, and Noon Wine, a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise.Selected and introduced by Sarah Churchwell, these 12 short stories by Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) include the three long tales published as Pale Horse, Pale Rider in 1937 and widely considered to be her masterpiece: Old Mortality, Noon Wine and Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

    He has come to detest his boring job and the petty superior he must defer to; his marriage is falling apart; he feels betrayed by his friends, he disdains the young student who offers him the passion and sense of wonder he once derived from his wife; and he seems concerned only with his annual hunting trip which, he hopes, will restore a purpose and identity to his life. But events continue to frustrate him: his wife aborts the child who might have saved their relationship; the new apartment they have wrested from the grudging bureaucracy seems more a tomb than a home; and ultimately, suicide appears to be Zilov's only alternative. But, in the end, emboldened by vodka and defying the persistent bad weather, Zilov does go hunting for the will to live is stronger than the desire to give up, and hope remains, even in the gray sameness of an existence gone stale.

    Weaving tales of India and of the new settlers in America, Chitra Divakaruni's stories explore themes of solitude, expectations, love and betrayal, as well as other reflections on life in both the East and the West.

    In The Anna Karenina Fix, Groskop mines these and other works, as well as the lives of their celebrated creators and her own experiences as a student of Russian, to answer the question “How should you live your life?” or at least be less miserable. This is a charming and fiercely intelligent book, a love letter to Russian literature.

    

    These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter’s own reading: a his­tory of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son “Nebuchadnezzasaurus,” ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia’s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions—of truth and fiction, of time and timeless­ness, of love and war, of Death and the Word—and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys.

     Daisy McDare is busy nursing a broken heart, trying to build up her interior decorator business, and baking cookies when murder strikes Cozy Creek. At first she leaves the investigation to Chris Crumple, the local bumbling police detective. But when Crumple arrests the wrong suspect, Daisy takes the investigation into her own hands. Cracking the case won't be easy. She'll need help from her pastry-baking best friend Samantha, her wise-cracking Granny Annie, and her trusty West Highland Terrier Shamus.