Sergei Zhadan was one of the few who grasped our era like a tiger by the tail, saw the funny in its sorrows and the tragic in its joys, described its uniqueness. 'Time moves under your skin,' says Zhadan, 'and if you have thin skin, you can even see it.' And so the managers gather after a hard day at the bar, fat, heavy and inactive middle managers, hustle in the bar like seals, beat with...

From the flamboyant and unpredictable Maryska, who scandalises the town when she cuts short her golden tresses, to the eccentric Uncle Pepin, who always has to have a ready supply of furniture to smash when he's angry, Bohumil Hrabal creates a range of enchanting and memorable characters - confirming his status as one of Europe's greatest writers.

Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation--published in two elegant volumes--is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during...

Wie alle Hauptwerke Hermann Hesses hat auch der Demian, den der damals 40jährige Autor mitten im Ersten Weltkrieg schrieb, eine ebenso ungewöhnliche wie spannende Entstehungs- und Wirkungsgeschichte. Daß dieses im Herbst 1917 vollendete Buch erst im Juni 1919, ein halbes Jahr nach Kriegsende, veröffentlicht wurde, lag an der Unbekanntheit des Verfassers. Denn Hesse hatte das Manuskript dem...

»Harry Haller ist in das kulturlose und unmenschliche Inferno unserer prunkenden und lärmenden Gegenwart vorgedrungen und steht mit seinem Begriff von Menschenwert… einsam außerhalb der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Seine Sehnsucht kennt eine unerreichbare Wirklichkeit: seine Verzweiflung treibt ihn zuweilen in die erreichbare andere zurück. Lust und Enttäuschung ihres Daseins führen in seinem...

The Gadfly is set in 1840s Italy, at a time when the country was chafing under Austrian rule. The titular character is a charming, witty writer of pointed political satires who finds himself running with a crowd of revolutionaries. The plot develops as the revolutionaries struggle against the government and as the Gadfly struggles with a mysterious hatred of the Church, and of a certain...

What will be the fate of the paper book in the world of smart fleas and holograms, viviparous fur and goldfish, after the New Middle Ages and the Second Islamic Revolution? In the novel 'Manaraga' Vladimir Sorokin sets an unexpected vector for thinking about the relationship of humanity with the printed word. The unusual profession of the protagonist - an underground worker, a romantic, a...

Job is the tale of Mendel Singer, a pious Eastern-European Jew who teaches the Torah to children, and whose faith is tested at every turn. His youngest son seems to be incurably disabled, one of his older sons joins the Russian Army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is running around with a Cossack. When he flees with his wife and daughter, further blows of fate await him . ....

From the author: Dear readers! I would like some of you to believe that the so-called non-normative speech of the characters is not a consequence of the author’s linguistic promiscuity, but an artistic necessity, which, in my opinion, is the duty of any writer who considers himself a realist writer to follow. That is, the speech of a former thief, a pickpocket or a peasant, or a hard worker...

Here cattlemen steal geese, drink port on the roof of the Kazan Cathedral, Soviet citizens hunt for shortages and mock the leaders; here the romantic builders of the Great Empire love, believe and cheat, and the golden Brezhnev era becomes clearer in the haze like a beautiful and nostalgic picaresque novel.

'Legends of Arbat' is a collection of incredibly funny and dizzying stories from the Soviet and recent past. Ruthless truth and folk mythology form a brilliant alloy and explosive mixture.

Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to...