He gave orders that they were not to get any hot glum pudding in flames, for fear the spirits in their innards might catch fire...The Steel Flea is an uproarious and alcohol-soaked shaggy-dog story from one of Russia's great comic masters.

    They are looked down upon by all around them, including the bun bakers. Their only seeming solace is the sixteen-year-old Tanya who visits them every morning for the kringles they give her.

    It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all...'

    One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.

    Credited with revitalizing the short story as a genre in Russian literature, he was posthumously honored with the Soviet Union's highest literary prize following his untimely death at the age of forty-five. Stories from a Siberian Village introduces Shukshin to English readers with twenty-five stories that reflect the Siberian origins of his artistic identity. These stories, most of which have never before appeared in English, are set in a remote Siberian village caught in transition between rural traditions and modern Soviet life. There Shukshin's peasants—survivors of revolution, collectivization, and war—seek their identity in a "brave new world." Eccentrics and oddballs, Shukshin's protagonists are restless freedom seekers whose dreams and foibles are as broad and inexplicable as their native Siberian landscape. As touchy as artists and as unpretentious as truck drivers, they struggle with questions of life and death, faith and reason, custom and progress. From their mutual misapprehensions and the gap between their dreams and reality arises Shukshin's biting humor.

    "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.

    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.

    The writing is colloquial and often whimsical, and many of the stories take supernatural phenomena very much for granted, as with the werewolves of the title story, or another in which the protagonist discovers that everyone around him is, in fact, asleep at all times. This sense of precarious unreality, though humorous, offers telling insight into the state of contemporary Russian society.Vera Pavlovna's ninth dream -- The ontology of childhood -- Sleep -- Tai Shou Chuan USSR (A Chinese folk tale) -- The Tarzan swing -- A werewolf problem in Central Russia -- Bulldozer driver's day -- Prince of Gosplan

    . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn't matter - if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin's tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, and even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on.

    Included here is Crown-Fire, Country Full of Swedes, The Windfall, Horse Thief, Yellow Girl and Kneel to the Rising Sun.

    Stephen Pearl's new translation, the first major English-language publication of Oblomov in more than fifty years, succeeds exquisitely to introduce this astonishing and endearing novel to a new generation of readers.

    These stories all deal with the common theme of the awakening of love at unpremeditated time and place, catching the victims off-guard. For the essential flavor of the tales, read Sunstroke, the story of a chance encounter on board ship; and A Night at Sea, perhaps the most unusual story of the group. Russian -- some about cultured people, some about peasants. The market is:- all who like exceptional short stories; all who are interested in getting the feel of one of the most famous writers.

    The poems are prefaced by a thoughful introduction by the poet Joseph Brodsky, a friend of Akhmatova in her later years.

    Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.