The family saga in the short stories ‘Almost never the other way around’ by the prominent Ukrainian writer Maria Mathios is not inferior to her famous ‘Sweet Darusa’ in terms of skill of writing and depth of presentation. ‘It is not time that counts, but a person in the circumstances of time’ - the writer reveals this thesis through the dramatic history of several Hutsul families during the...

Zuleikha is the model of a dutiful wife. Biddible and meek, she has resigned herself to brutal treatment at the hands of her cruel husband and the carping of her despotic mother-in-law. While Russia reels in the aftermath of its recent revolution, life in her small Tatar village is relatively untouched. Or so it seems to Zuleikha, until the day her husband is executed by communist soldiers....

In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will...

And those who are not. Live on is a new book by Narine Abgaryan about the inhabitants of the Armenian town of Berd on the border with Azerbaijan. History of the homeland Manyuni, but at a different time - before the war and after. Berd has everything you need for a happy life - mountains, gardens, cozy houses. Residents still cook kavurma, collect honey, bake bread, weave carpets and raise...

A multi award-winning story of friendship and feuds in a remote Armenian mountain village. In an isolated village high in the Armenian mountains, a close-knit community bickers, gossips and laughs. Their only connection to the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even goats struggle to navigate. As they go about their daily lives - harvesting crops,...

'People who are always with me' is a family saga, the story of several generations of one family. The story of people who have gone through many difficult trials, but have preserved in their hearts kindness, humanity and love for each other. A novel about elders, about loved ones who support us all our lives - even after leaving, even invisibly - and make us who we are.

Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Torless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he struggles to come to terms with his conflicting emotions. Through his relationship with two other boys Torless is led into sadistic and sexual encounters with a third pupil which both repel and...

His short story collection Drei Frauen (Three Women) -- consisting of Grigia, The Portuguese Lady, and Tonka -- was published in 1924. Musil in these tales explores Europe on the verge between civilization and brutality, the modern and pre-modern, nationalism and humanism, and between ‘precision and soul,’ to use Musil's own phrase. In encounters with the three women of the title, each male...

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

Together with poets and thinkers we walk through the streets of Vienna: with Stefan Zweig we visit the Vienna Concert Hall, Ingeborg Bachmann shows us the Ungargassenland and we meet Friedrich Torberg for a piece of Sachertorte. And Klaus Mann, Robert Seethaler and Arthur Schnitzler also have a lot to say.

One of the most intense yet absorbing studies ever done of a normal man's descent into drunkenness.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a...