When Toni Muhr returned to Vienna from the war in the fall of 1916, Emperor Franz Joseph I was being ceremonially buried. Toni's world seems to be getting out of joint in other respects too: his employer quite obviously applied for the chemical patent himself, which he had offered him for sale in vain shortly before he was drafted into military service, and thus made incredible wealth during...

'This is the story of the musician Johannes Elias Alder, who at the age of twenty-two committed his life to death after deciding not to sleep any longer.' – With his debut novel about the life and death of a musical genius in an Austrian mountain village, Robert Schneider succeeded sensational world success, which was translated into over 30 languages, successfully filmed and became a...

Be Faithful unto Death is the moving story of a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in an old-established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Misi, a dreamer and would-be writer, is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket. The torments through which he goes ? and grows ? are superbly described. The novel is brimming with vivid detail from the...

This gem of Slovak naturalism was written in 1940. The story takes the reader to a mountain village. The protagonist narrates the vicissitudes, suffering, and success he experiences as he pursues a love affair, resulting in the triumph of pure love.

The House of a Thousand Floors is one of the earliest science-fiction novels in European literature, published first in 1929. Besides being a pioneer in its genre, the book is highly regarded for its general merits as psychological literature. The novel tells the story of a dream in fever of a soldier wounded in World War I. He finds himself in the stairway of a gigantic (and kafkaesque)...

Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One...

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk...

This book compiles stories and novellas, written in America (with the exception of one) in the last decade. It's symbolic title That Strange Feeling of Freedom is not incidental.

Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with...

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in...

This book is the funniest (though not always the most fun) book of the last decade. The amazing lightness of the ironic style and the combination of sarcasm with nostalgia made 'Legends of Nevsky Prospekt' a truly national bestseller. Incredible stories from our recent past, told by the master, are increasingly perceived not as the writer's fantasies, but as if turning into a reality known to...