The Prophet Almustafa, having lived for twelve years in the alien city of Orphalese, is preparing to return home. Along the way, he is stopped by a group of locals, who are interested in the prophet's views on love and death, freedom and power, good and evil. Almustafa's laconic yet comprehensive reflections are presented in the form of parables. They not only provide answers to the...

A very unusual collection. A very unusual Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is not only (and not so much) tragic, but also ironic, funny, touching, and even sentimental. Dostoevsky of the ‘small form’ is a master of topical plots, comic situations, and witty dialogue.

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. 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...

The summer of 1928 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever in moving,...

Brigitte Reimann is a German writer from the GDR. Post-war Germany, the tragic division of the country into two parts, a new generation of young people who received a terrible inheritance from their parents and are trying to build a better country on the ruins—all of this is imbued in the author's work.

It is the winter of 1945, the last dark days of World War II in occupied Holland. A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated as he rides home on his bicycle. The Germans retaliate by burning down the home of an innocent family; only twelve-year-old Anton survives. Based on actual events, The Assault traces the complex repercussions of this horrific incident on Anton's life....

When Oksana and her family move from the Ukraine to Florida to begin a new American life, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her cranky mother sits at home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets from men. All Oksana wants is to be as far away from her family as possible, to have friends, and to be normal—and though she...

Famous for his enormously influential poetry and plays, Alexander Pushkin is also beloved for his short stories. This collection showcases his tremendous range, which enabled him to portray the Russian people through romance, drama, and satire. The sparkling humor of the five ‘Tales of Belkin’ contrasts with Pushkin's dark fable of gambling and obsessive greed in ‘The Queen of Spades’ and his...

Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter--the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise--and tell of the atrocities they've suffered, or that they've invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter's own reading: a his-tory of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son...

The Queen of Spades; The Tales of Belkin; Peter the Great's Blackamoor; The Captain's Daughter.

Eight stories, eight women, an emotional multitude. In her short-story collection, Birthday, Jana Egle distinctly straps the male presence into the back seat and lets the female voice ring free. Not to be taken as ‘a book for women’ or ‘women's literature,’ the themes and situations in Birthday present a familiar, yet uneasy, vantage point for any reader, regardless of personal, real-life...

Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin-like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an...