"It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

    Luzhin, a distracted, withdrawn boy, takes up chess as a refuge from everyday life. As he rises to the heights of grandmaster, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality as he moves inexorably towards madness.

    

    Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he alternately admires and detests. 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' became an important part of the 'Sturm und Drang movement, and greatly influenced later 'Romanticism'. The work is semi-autobiographical - in 1772, two years before the novel was published, Goethe had passed through a similar tempestuous period, when he lost his heart to Charlotte Buff, who was at that time engaged to his friend Johann Christian Kestner.

    The story recounts the love between his new sister-in-law Jamilia and a local crippled young man, Daniyar, while Jamilia's husband, Sadyk, is away at the front during World War II.Based on clues in the story, it takes place in northwestern Kyrgyzstan, presumably Talas Province. The story is backdropped against the collective farming culture which was early in its peak in that period.Chingiz Aïtmatov was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1928. His work appeared in over one hundred languages, and received numerous awards, including the Lenin Prize. He was the Kyrgyz ambassador to the European Union, NATO, UNESCO and the Benelux countries.Translated by James Riordan.

    Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural. The tale of a man who is incapacitated by visions of the future and the cacophony of overheard thoughts, and yet who can’t help trying to subvert his vividly glimpsed destiny, it is easy to read The Lifted Veil as being autobiographically revealing—of Eliot’s sensitivity to public opinion and her awareness that her days concealed behind a pseudonym were doomed to a tragic unveiling (as indeed came to pass soon after this novella’s publication). But it is easier still to read the story as the exciting and genuine precursor of a moody new form, as well as an absorbing early masterpiece of suspense.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

    "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.

    The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison SalisburyThis unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.

    This chilling account of postpartum depression and a husband's controlling behavior in the guise of treatment will leave you breathless.

    Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.

    More than a hundred years later, this tale of the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll and the drug that unleashes his evil, inner persona—the loathsome, twisted Mr. Hyde—has lost none of its ability to shock. Its realistic police-style narrative chillingly relates Jekyll's desperation as Hyde gains control of his soul—and gives voice to our own fears of the violence and evil within us. Written before Freud's naming of the ego and the id, Stevenson's enduring classic demonstrates a remarkable understanding of the personality's inner conflicts—and remains the irresistibly terrifying stuff of our worst nightmares.

    Dive into this classic from the singular mind of Edgar Allan Poe, who is widely regarded as the short story master of horror fiction. "The Fall .. " recounts the terrible events that befall the last remaining members of the once-illustrious Usher clan before it is -- quite literally -- rent asunder. With amazing economy, Poe plunges the reader into a state of deliciously agonizing suspense. It's a must-read for fans of the golden era of horror writing. "The Fall .." is one of Poe's best known short stories - if not the best.Librarian's note: this entry is for the short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher." Collections of short stories by the author, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales," can be found elsewhere on Goodreads.

    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.

    Published in 1867, this is Zola's most important work before the Rougon-Macquart series and introduces many of the themes that can be traced through the later novel cycle.

    Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereThis short novel, already a modern classic, is the superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the giant Marlin he kills and loses—specifically referred to in the citation accompanying the author's Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.