Jack London was a master storyteller and one of the world's most popular American writers. His books are filled with thrilling adventures, rugged romance, and noble sentiments that remain with his characters even through the harshest trials. This is especially true of his works set in the American North—a region where the author himself experienced perilous adventures and about which he wrote...

A young university student named Jurek, with no particular ambitions or talents, is adrift. After his doting aunt asks him to perform a small chore, he decides to kill her for no good reason other than, perhaps, boredom. Killing Auntie follows Jurek as he seeks to dispose of the corpse?a task more difficult than one might imagine?and then falls in love with a girl he meets on a train. Can he...

The Soviet and post-Soviet world, with its untold multitude of crimes, is a natural breeding ground for ghost stories. No one writes them more movingly than Russian author Sergei Lebedev, who in this stunning volume probes a collective guilty conscience marked by otherworldliness and the denial of misdeeds. These eleven tales share a mystical topography in which the legacy of totalitarian...

A multitude of different personalities dwell within each of us, yet a rational mind suppresses any attempt they might make to assert their independence. Rosa, the protagonist of Tatyana Shcherbina’s novel, spent many years in a lethargic sleep; it is hardly surprising, then, that she slips back and forth between classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the final years of the USSR. Yet the...

It is not only financial capital that is facing difficulties today. These challenges hinder the development of the information society and manifest as a decline in the intellect’s orientation toward the future. In his new book, the renowned scholar—philologist, philosopher, and cultural theorist—Igor Pavlovich Smirnov examines the turmoil shaking the global economy in the 21st century as an...

Did Kings Saul, David, and Solomon actually exist? Who authored the Pentateuch, and which events described in the Old Testament truly took place? In exploring the most complex enigmas of biblical studies, Russian scholar Andrey Desnitsky asks: is it valid to treat Holy Scripture as a historical source? Can we reconstruct the biblical past using the scientific method, and to what extent are such...

Alexey Ivanov chronicles Akinfiy Demidov’s battle against this fire demon. Ivanov’s dark Gothic narrative mirrors the course of history. Although 18th-century Russia was an agrarian nation, a new industrial mentality was already taking shape at the Demidov plants. By the 19th century, this mindset had come to dominate the entire industrial Urals, and in the 20th century, it spread across the...

*Summa Technologiae* marked the culmination of the classical era of future studies. In this book, Stanislaw Lem conducted a unique and bold technological analysis of civilizations. He examined the potential emergence of fundamentally new groups of scientific disciplines and completely rejected simple extrapolative models of the future. Written over forty years ago, the book remains entirely...