Coming from a provincial working-class family, Platonov wholeheartedly accepted the October Revolution, and the more interesting is the fact that his works convey with unprecedented force a personal ideological tragedy, unusually clearly expressed in ‘The Pit.’ The very idea of building a ‘Common Proletarian House’ turns ‘The Pit’ into a dystopia that is shocking in its power, where the details...

‘A fascinating, gripping story of the confrontation between the fearless young meteorologist Klimenko and the half-mad, brilliant adventurer Bailey, who has learned to liquefy air from the atmosphere and sell the resulting balls of air gas hydrate. Bailey's criminal activity leads to radical climate change. The Earth begins to lose its atmosphere. How can we stop the ‘air seller’ before he...

Schlump, written by Hans Herbert Grimm, was published anonymously in 1928 and was one of the first German novels to describe World War I in all its horror and absurdity, and it remains one of the best. What really sets it apart is its remarkable central character. Who is Schlump? A bit of a rascal and a bit of a sweetheart, a victim of his times, an inveterate survivor, maybe even a new type of...

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukranian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of...

The hero of The Star Diaries, Ijon Tichy, like Gulliver, communes with various extraterrestrial beings. During his numerous interplanetary journeys, the traveler has met various alien civilizations, created by both sentient beings and advanced robots.

In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a ‘sissy’ by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal,...

Yuli Gugolev is a translator and a winner of the Moskovskiy Schyot Prize and the Poetry Prize who has one of the most recognizable poetic voices in Russia now. ‘Orc Fields’ includes poems written after February 2022.

The theme of Hrabal's famous prose is the life of Jan Dítet, a waiter, later a hotelier and finally a traveler during a time of political upheaval. It is a book about Czechness, the greatness and ugliness within us, which was made into a film by Jirí Menzel in 2006.

A worker at a waste paper collection center, Hanta, has worked at a printing press for thirty-five years. He rescues rare books from piles of paper, reads them, and is thus ''educated against his will.'' The novella Too Noisy Solitude is Hanta’s inner monologue with many recurring motifs. The reader gets to know Hanta’s first love, Mancinka, and the gypsy Ilonka, who disappeared in a...

The Good Soldier Švejk is one of the most famous and popular characters not only in Czech but also in world literature. This is evidenced by the fact that, along with numerous editions at home and abroad, the work has become a classic in the true sense of the word, which is constantly read and quoted. Perhaps we could also talk about a part of our national character, whether in a good or...

In Serhiy Zhadan's book, readers will find poems written over many years, directly or indirectly related to the railway. Here, the station square comes to dreams, people who look like snails sleep at stations and carry their own homes on their shoulders, soldiers go to the East to defend the country and return to their families. To the soft clatter of wheels and late horns, passengers count...

For the first time in the last hundred years, the prose of Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko returns to readers as it really was. With its own rhythm and special Slobozhan dialect. Vengeful witches, the dead who celebrate Easter, enchanted treasures, a tumbleweed - a witness against a murderer... Before us appears a vivid and mystical picture of life in Ukrainian lands from Konotop to Kharkiv....