Конармия. Одесские Рассказы.


Isaac Babel - 1926
    Published individually in magazines throughout 1923 and 1924 and collected into a book in 1931, they deal primarily with a group of Jewish thugs that live in the Moldavanka, a ghetto of Odessa.

We


Yevgeny Zamyatin - 1924
    In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression.

Time Storm


Gordon R. Dickson - 1977
    A time storm has devastated the Earth, and only a small fraction of humankind remains. From the rubble, three survivors form an unlikely alliance: a young man, a young woman, and a leopard.

Invitation to a Beheading


Vladimir Nabokov - 1938
    In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his final days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his prison cell.

Mumu


Ivan Turgenev - 1852
    Mumu (Russian: «Муму») is a short story by Ivan Turgenev, a Russian novelist and story writer, written in 1854.The story of Gerasim, a deaf and mute serf whose life of poverty is brought into sharp relief by his connection with Mumu, a dog he rescued, brought greater national attention to the cruelties of serfdom, and received praise for its brutal portrayal of this institution in Russian society.

The Duel


Aleksandr Kuprin - 1905
    An absorbing saga about the brutalities of military life upon its own soldiers. Stranded at a distant outpost, young Romashov finds himself obliged to fight a duel — over something he realizes is meaningless. As the novel hurtles toward a startling conclusion, it reveals itself to be a luminous depiction of the end of an era.

The Three Fat Men


Yury Olesha - 1924
    The scene is set in a fantastic land ruled by three greedy fat men who are engrossed in eating and making merry in their palace. Meanwhile, curious things are happening outside the high palace walls.You will learn all about this and much more when you read this wise, merry tale that is so like the truth. The Three Fat Men, a favorite with all Soviet children, has run to over 30 printings, it was made into a film, and performed at many theaters in Russia."Yuri Olesha (1899-1960), a Soviet prose writer and playwright, is immensely popular with readers for his novel Envy, his short stories, plays and the famous book for children The Three Fat Men, which is really one of his masterpieces.""Yuri Olesha's book The Three Fat Men is fantastic, fabulous, abounding in extraordinary transformation and fascinating happenings." -Literaturnaya Gazeta-"There was something Beethovenian in Yuri Olesha, even in his voice. His eyes discovered many marvelous, impressive things around him, and he wrote about them briefly, precisely and excellently. -Konstantin Paustovsky-

Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod


Nikolai Gogol - 1831
    Here, this extraordinary countryside is revealed in all its variety in his first two collections of short stories. The only translation available of this cycle of stories, this edition captures fully the spirit and vigor of his important early work for the first time.

Moscow 2042


Vladimir Voinovich - 1987
    An exiled Soviet writer discovers that a German travel agency is booking flights through a time warp to a variety of tempting sites and dates in the future. Moscow? The year 2042? How can he resist? Afterword by the Author. Translated by Richard Lourie.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Volume I


Anne Brontë - 1848
    The character development is very strong and realistic, and the dialogue of the novel is very powerful.

Fiasco


Stanisław Lem - 1986
    It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding. Translated by Michael Kandel.The novel was published in German translation (translated by H. Schumann) in 1986. The Polish text published in 1987, the English translation (by M. Kandel) the same year.

The Galosh: And Other Stories


Mikhail Zoshchenko - 1968
    His stories give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920's and `30s, beset by an acute housing shortage, ubiquitous theft and corruption, and the impenetrable new ideological language of the Soviet state. Written in the semi-educated talk of the man or woman on the street, these stories enshrine one of the greatest achievements of the people of the Soviet Union—their gallows humor. Housing block tenants who reject electricity because it illuminates their squalor too harshly, a young couple who live in a bathroom, a railway-line manager making a speech against bribery who accidentally mentions his own affinity for kickbacks—in all of Zoschenko's characters, petty materialism is balanced with a poignant faith in the revolutionary project. Zoschenko, the self-described "temporary substitute for the proletarian writer," combines wicked satire and an earthy empathy with a brilliance that places him squarely in the classic Russian comic tradition. Jeremy Hick's translation of The Galosh brings together sixty five of Zoschenko's finest short stories—bringing the choice writings of perhaps Soviet Russia's most humorous and moving writer to American readers for the first time.

What Is to Be Done?


Nikolai Chernyshevsky - 1863
    For Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution."--Joseph Frank, The Southern ReviewAlmost from the moment of its publication in 1863, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done?, had a profound impact on the course of Russian literature and politics. The idealized image it offered of dedicated and self-sacrificing intellectuals transforming society by means of scientific knowledge served as a model of inspiration for Russia's revolutionary intelligentsia. On the one hand, the novel's condemnation of moderate reform helped to bring about the irrevocable break between radical intellectuals and liberal reformers; on the other, Chernyshevsky's socialist vision polarized conservatives' opposition to institutional reform. Lenin himself called Chernyshevsky "the greatest and most talented representative of socialism before Marx"; and the controversy surrounding What Is to Be Done? exacerbated the conflicts that eventually led to the Russian Revolution.Michael R. Katz's readable and compelling translation is now the definitive unabridged English-language version, brilliantly capturing the extraordinary qualities of the original. William G. Wagner has provided full annotations to Chernyshevsky's allusions and references and to the, sources of his ideas, and has appended a critical bibliography. An introduction by Katz and Wagner places the novel in the context of nineteenth-century Russian social, political, and intellectual history and literature, and explores its importance for several generations of Russian radicals.

Langrishe, Go Down


Aidan Higgins - 1966
    Their relationship, told in lush, erotic, and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down, which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."

The Worst Witch at School


Jill Murphy - 2007
    . . . Humorous, gently eerie drawings on almost every page add to the fun." — SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL