Thirteen contemporary writers writing in Russian have created thirteen short stories about the customs and traditions in their cultures: diverse, yet nevertheless based on the same phenomena and processes. Coming of age (for example, through a computer game, as in Dasha Blagova's story), choosing a profession (becoming a shepherd or a vlogger, as in Islam Khanipaev's text), marriage (between...

‘The novel ‘Measuring the World’ fascinatingly, intelligently, and with subtle humor tells the story of two geniuses of the Enlightenment era, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, as typical representatives of the German national character in all its manifestations. These two outstanding men were very different in every respect. While Humboldt traveled almost the entire globe,...

Dina Rubina is a contemporary prose writer and winner of the Russian ‘Big Book’ award. Her novella ‘On Upper Maslovka Street’ was adapted into a film in 2004, starring Alisa Freindlich and Yevgeny Mironov. This work is largely personal for Rubina. While living in Moscow, the writer and her husband visited Nina Ilyinichna Niss-Goldman, a famous artist. She sculpted portraits of Bryusov,...

One of the most important novels of our time, which has entered the post-war canon of European literature, was first published in 1959. Its protagonist is the ‘little man’ Oskar Matzerath, whose childhood coincides with the years of the rise of National Socialism. Aware of the absurdity of reality, he decides to stop growing and refuses to become an adult. His constant companion is a tin...

One of the most famous works by the 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. – A disturbing and captivating novel that is impossible to put down. – The story of a small town where the arrival of a strange circus with a giant whale triggers a chain of mysterious events. – The book served as the basis for the legendary film ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ by director Béla Tarr.

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army. Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras,...

Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco—among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary...

Ben Richards has no job, no money, and a young daughter who urgently needs medical attention. Desperate, out of options, he signs up for The Running Man, ‘the biggest show in the country.’ It’s an ultraviolent competition where the stakes could not be higher. Ben must stay alive for thirty days while an elite strike force, trained to kill, hunts for him. If he can survive for a month, he...

Travel to 1920s China, a time when the last emperor still ruled and the sweeping changes of the twentieth century were distant rumblings, with this timeless, evocative classic tale of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his family as they struggle to survive in the midst of vast political and social upheavals.

Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China. Revolutions sweep the vast nation, leaving destruction and death in their wake, yet also promising emancipation to China's oppressed millions who are groping for a way to survive...

Pearl divers discover giant salamanders on one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean. It quickly becomes clear that the amphibians are capable of speaking various languages, reading, and reasoning. Soon, industrialists and magnates begin to use the trusting and hardworking creatures in construction projects throughout the world's oceans. The salamander population grows rapidly, and they form...

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts: a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. As a boy he meets a foreign commander who adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of adventurous friends. Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, they decide to go in search of the legendary priest-king Prester...