This collection brings together plays by Mikhail Bulgakov that were not published during the author's lifetime. The action of *Flight* unfolds against the backdrop of the Civil War; it is a drama depicting the anguish and plight of the Russian émigré community. *Ivan Vasilievich* is a spirited comedy that later served as the basis for the screenplay of the beloved film *Ivan Vasilievich Changes...

*A Story of a Life: Books 1–3* introduces the reader to the most crucial stages of the author’s biography—childhood, youth, and early adulthood—set against the backdrop of the country’s rapidly changing history. – In *Distant Years*, Paustovsky portrays the world of his childhood: family, nature, early travels, and the impressions that shaped the future writer’s character. *Restless Youth*...

– *The Story of a Life* is not a dry memoir but a major literary work in which a real-life biography transforms into a genuine novel. – Through the author’s recollections, the reader journeys from his pre-revolutionary childhood and school years to his early literary successes. The protagonist describes wars, relocations between cities, newspaper work, and encounters with the people who shaped...

A landmark novel that officially marks the very inception of the dystopian genre. Banned during the Soviet era, it is now considered a classic of not only Russian but also world literature of the 20th century. It is a novel about a ‘society of equals’ in which the human individual is reduced to a mere ‘number.’ Everything is standardized—clothing and apartments, thoughts and feelings. There are...

Oliver is eleven years old, and he chose his own name after a favorite Dickens character. He loves playing Snake on his phone and eating food ‘like they do in America’; he dreams of defeating the bully Tsapa, being cured of HIV, and finding a real family. But just as his prospective mom and dad arrive from Salt Lake City, TV reports begin predicting the imminent end of the world. Fiction writer...

A circle of hedonists at the Baden-Baden resort is rife with intense passions and ceaseless, heated debates about the fate of the fatherland. Grigory Litvinov, a thirty-year-old landowner, views this farce with a mix of boredom and irony; however, a chance encounter with a past love—the beautiful, high-society socialite Irina Ratmirova—splits his life into ‘before’ and ‘after,’ transforming him...

Gilles de Rais—a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and a Marshal of France—was also a bloodthirsty serial killer. The Roman Emperor Tiberius—a contemporary of Jesus Christ—was one of history's most notorious libertines. What connection do they have to Epstein’s island? What is reincarnation, really? Are we responsible for actions committed in past lives? Was it truly *us*? Who was Jeffrey...

*Summa Technologiae* marked the culmination of the classical era of future studies. In this book, Stanislaw Lem conducted a unique and bold technological analysis of civilizations. He examined the potential emergence of fundamentally new groups of scientific disciplines and completely rejected simple extrapolative models of the future. Written over forty years ago, the book remains entirely...

By pure chance, scientists detect a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders—including whether or not they even exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master’s Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from...