Lazar Lindt, a brilliant scientist and a big child, ‘a lawless comet in a circle of calculating luminaries’, is the center of the infernal personal stories of three extraordinary women. The childless Marusya, the wife of his older friend, will fall in love with a funny young man who appeared on the threshold of her house in 1918, not at all filial love, but it will remain his secret. After the...

The play ‘The Days of the Turbins’ is a true pearl of Bulgakov's dramaturgy. In it, the Civil War appears to the reader exactly as it really was: merciless, bloody, fratricidal. And in this chaos of broken lives and ruined hopes, the heroes, frozen in indecision on the threshold of change, seem even more touching. The collection also includes ‘Zoyka's Apartment’, which the author himself called...

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences,...

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and...

Strange, almost magical, things are afoot in Lviv. Seagulls circle overhead while the passing breeze carries a briny whiff, even though the coast is far away. A ragtag group of aging hippies gather around a mysterious grave in Lychakiv Cemetery. Among them are an ex-KGB officer and the old subversive he once spied upon. Soon, Captain Ryabtsev and Alik Olisevych band together to uncover the...

The protagonists of Andris Kurprišs’s debut collection are at times melancholy and worrisome, and world-angry or absurdist at others. Kuprišs plays with tension, a building up to climaxes reminiscent of Henry James—but with endings that leave a lingering sense of having missed some important detail, some sinister clue that will reveal all meaning. Deceptively simple, nostalgic, and resigned,...

Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler's clandestine 'Lebensborn' project, which strove for a 'racially pure' Germany.

Samson Kolechko and his colleague have been dispatched to investigate the illegal sale of meat. How selling cuts of one’s own livestock qualifies as a crime eludes the young investigator, but an order is an order, and, at the insistence of the secret police officer assigned to ‘reinforce’ the Lybid police station, Samson vows to do his very best. But just as Samson is beginning to dig into the...

Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to...

This book introduces readers to the legacy of the outstanding Russian writer Varlam Shalamov. The works included in the collection give a complete picture of the various stages of his work. A series of 'Kolyma Tales' is published here, as well as stories from the collections 'Left Bank', 'A Spade Artist', 'Essays on the Underworld,' 'Resurrection of Larch,' and 'Glove, or KR-2.'

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family.' But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him...

The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad is set mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z - an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several embedded narratives attributed to an alcoholic chemist-turned-massage therapist give insight into the funny, ironic, or tragic lives of people who remained in...