The town of Tarusa lies 101 kilometers outside Moscow, far enough to have served, under Soviet rule, as a place where former political prisoners and other 'undesirables' could legally settle. Lying between the center of power and the provinces, between the modern urban capital and the countryside, Tarusa is the perfect place from which to observe a Russia that, in Maxim Osipov's words, 'changes...

Includes city maps of Kyiv, Lviv,Odesa, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovs'k

If every war needs its master chronicler, Ukraine has Serhiy Zhadan, one of Europe's most promising novelists. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a...

The events of the novel The Night Reporter take place in Lviv in 1938. Journalist Marko Krylovych, nicknamed the 'night reporter' for his nightly coverage of the life of the city’s underbelly, takes on the investigation of the murder of a candidate for president of the city government. While doing this, he ends up in various love intrigues as well as criminal adventures, sometimes risking his...

The Seventh Cross is one of the most powerful, popular, and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today than when it was first published in 1942. Seven political prisoners escape from a Nazi prison camp; in response, the camp commandant has seven trees harshly pruned...

Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, Jozef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre in the forest of Katyn´ in April 1940. Memories of Starobielsk portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait, others in vivid sketches that mingle intimacy with respect, as Czapski describes...

Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred Doblin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time.

Victor is depressed: his lover has dumped him, his short stories are too short, and the light has gone off in his dingy apartment. His only companion is Misha, the penguin he rescued from Kiev's Zoo, when it couldn't feed the animals anymore. Misha is the silent witness to Victor's despair, and joins in his celebration - fish and vodka - when Victor's luck seems to turn: he is commissioned to...

One of the most significant East German writers, Brigitte Reimann (1933-1973) wrote irreverent, autobiographical works that addressed issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the GDR. Outspoken and idealistic, she wrote in her diaries that she would rather 'live 30 wild years instead of 70 well-behaved ones.' Considered a master of socialist realism, she heeded the state's call for...

When Maxim Kammerer, a young space explorer from twenty-second-century Earth, crash-lands on an uncharted world, he thinks of himself as a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. Eager to establish first contact with the planet's humanlike inhabitants, he finds himself increasingly entangled in their primitive way of life. After his experiences in their nightmarish military, criminal justice, and mental...

Here the first three books of Paustovsky’s epic autobiography - long unavailable in English - appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the front lines of World War I and then as a...

The children's book classic in the famous English adaptation by Mark Twain, with all illustrations and the German original in the appendix.