Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, by people in all stages of life: one-night stands in communal apartments, poignantly awkward couplings, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, elopements, tentative courtships, and rampant infidelity, shot through with lurid violence, romantic illusion, and surprising tenderness.A murky fate --The fall --The goddess parka --Like Penelope --Ali-baba --Two deities --Father and mother --The impulse --Hallelujah, family! --Give her to me --Milgrom --Clarissa's story --Tamara's baby --Young berries --The adventures of Vera --Eros's way --A happy ending

    After disappearing from the Deputy Inspector's face, his nose shows up around town before returning to its proper place.

    At once nostalgic for a bygone, more innocent age and foreshadowing the turbulences of the 20th century, this wrenching novel is a triumph of bitter realism.

    In these three tales, superbly translated by Edward Seidensticker, erotic fantasy is underlaid with longing and memories of past loves.In the title story, the protagonist visits a brothel where elderly men spend a chaste but lecherous night with a drugged, unconscious virgin. As he admires the girl's beauty, he recalls his past womanizing, and reflects on the relentless course of old age. In One Arm, a young girl removes her right arm and gives it to the narrator to take home for the night; a surreal seduction follows as he tries to allay its fears, caresses it, and even replaces his own right arm with it.The protagonist of Of Birds and Beasts prefers the company of his pet birds and dogs to people, yet for him all living beings are beautiful objects which, though they give him pleasure, he treats with casual cruelty.Beautiful yet chilling, richly poetic yet subtly disturbing, these stories make compelling reading and reaffirm Kawabata s status as a world-class writer.

    Translated by Gregory Rabassa."More than a prelude...the dazzling sense of place, the colorful idiosyncrasy of character are present for us to marvel over once again."--The New Republic"An openly political novel posing the people of the land against the forces of oppression...it has the virtues of wit and compassion and reveals the foundation upon which the later novels were constructed."--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Star"One Hundred Years of Solitude is just around the rain-drenched corner."--Boston Globe

    They all have one person in common, their beloved therapist Natasha who, though central to the lives of all of the women, is absent from their meeting. The women represent the many cultural and social groups that modern Chile is comprised of—from a housekeeper to celebrity television personality. They are of disparate ages and races and their lives have been touched by major political events from the dictatorship of Pinochet to the Israel-Palestine conflict. But despite their differences, as the women tell their stories, unlikely bonds are formed, and their lives are transformed in this intricately woven, beautifully rendered tale of the universal bonds between women from one of Latin America’s most celebrated novelists.

    “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile. A starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners—but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.

    But tourists and opportunists are making inroads into the area, and the balance of nature is making a dangerous shift. Translated by Peter Bush.

    He turns the proverbial romantic triangle on its ear to create this New York Times bestselling erotic novel. French flaps and six full-color pages of classic artworks.

    He's got a job — transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe — and though he doesn't enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he's not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he's happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he's managed — at least so far — to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.

    A man of great natural dignity, imbued with respect for tradition and love of the land, he is also despotic and virtually illiterate. Into the family comes his son's new wife, a spirited, intelligent girl from the town. Her eyes see a different world--one tainted by grossness, cruelty, and squalor--and she suffers from the hostility of jealous sisters-in-law and the shortcomings of a husband whom she loves but cannot respect. Her relationship with Stepan Mikhailovich is the heart of a story in which Aksakov celebrates the old feudal way of life without concealing its darker, repressive side.

    An entertaining and whimsical novel from the Soviet Union about the misadventures of a half-demon violist sent to wreak havoc on Earth.

    A sweeping saga, it tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys—an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets—struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. An artist is chased into the woods, where he remains in hiding for four years; a researcher is forced to deem a patient insane, damning him to torture in a psychiatric ward; a man and his wife each become collaborators, without the other knowing. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s big yet intimate novel belongs to the tradition of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: a work of politics, love, and belief that is a revelation of life in dark times.

    Zhivago for its portrayal of Stalin's Russia, Generations of Winter is the romantic saga of the Gradov family from 1925 to 1945.

    From Zaita the cripple-maker to Kirsha the café owner with a taste for young boys and drugs, to Abbas the barber who mistakes greed for love, to Hamida who sells her soul to escape the alley, these characters vividly evoke the sights, sounds and smells of Cairo. Long after one finishes reading, the smell of fresh bread lingers, as does the image of the men gathering at the café for their nightly ritual. The universality and timelessness of this book cannot be denied.