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...

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...

Ukraine is a country caught in a political tug of war: looking East to Russia and West to the European Union, this pivotal nation has long been a pawn in a global ideological game. And since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 in response to the Ukrainian Euromaidan protests against oligarchical corruption, the game has become one of life and death.

In this remarkable book, Karl Schlogel unravels the interconnected histories of two of the world's most celebrated perfumes. In tsarist Russia, two French perfumers – Ernest Beaux and Auguste Michel – developed related fragrances honouring Catherine the Great for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Beaux fled Russia and took the formula...

The book, initiated by the Yegor Gaidar Foundation, presents 14 large-scale interviews with political figures who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, became the first leaders of the newly independent states. Askar Akaev, Leonid Kravchuk, Vytautas Landsbergis, Stanislav Shushkevich, Mircea Snegur, Gennady Burbulis, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, Arnold Ruutel, Ivar Godmanis, Isa Gambar, Tengiz...

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...

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...

For some reason, dad left on a business trip at night, and a few days later mom and younger brother disappeared without a trace, and Shurka and Tanya were left alone. 'The raven took it away' - everyone around whispers. But what is this Raven and who will show the way to the road? The border between the city of Crow and an ordinary city is easier to cross than an easy one - but only one way....

She's just a New York City girl living with her artist mom...News flash: Dad is prince of Genovia. (So that's why a limo always meets her at the airport!) Downer: Dad can't have any more kids. (So no heir to the throne.) Shock of the century: Like it or not, Mia is prime princess material. The worst part: Princess lessons from her dreaded grandmere, the dowager princess of Genovia, who thinks...

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead. And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he's definitely dead. But even in death he's not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days....

ItÆs the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square cafΘ, everything changes.