The novel ‘A Darkness Falls on the Old Steps,’ recognized as the best work of the 2000s (Russian Booker of the Decade Award, 2011), is based on the author’s family history. Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov, one of the greatest Russian philologists of the 20th century, grew up in an intelligent family, by the will of fate thrown to the ends of the world - to Shchuchinsk, a city of exiles on the...

For his debut novel (Former Son, 2014), Sasha Filipenko received the Russian Prize a year ago. On the first try - a first degree diploma in the ‘Large Prose’ category. So how can you start reading the next book after this? Moreover, the author clearly ‘made up’ the hero of ‘Former Son,’ which captivated everyone, from himself, his biography, his youthful impressions and feelings. Will his own...

This text radiates with furnace heat and exudes grave cold — and at the same time. The novel is based on materials from the investigative case of Pyotr Ilyich Nesterenko, director of the Moscow crematorium on the territory of the Don Necropolis. While working on the novel, Sasha Filipenko repeated the path of the main character, following him by visiting Saratov and Paris, Istanbul and Warsaw....

Too Loud a Solitude is a tender and funny story of Hanta–a man who has lived in a Czech police state–for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from jaws of hydraulic press and now his house is filled to...

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight.

Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's. In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape-her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm.

Three friends must urgently find the fourth, who disappeared in an unknown direction, and inform him about the suicide of his stepfather. Sasha Carburetor must make it to the funeral...

'Big Mac' is the title of Serhiy Zhadan's first prose book. The stories included in the new, expanded edition were written during the years 2002–2010. The texts are presented in chronological order, which enables the inquisitive reader to follow the time and geography of writing each of them.

Philosophical digressions, fantastic images, exquisite metaphors and specific humor - everything that is so attractive in Serhiy Zhadan's works is here. Stories of Babylon, retold for those who are interested in questions of love and death. The life of the city lying between the years, biographies of characters fighting for their right to be heard and understood, a chronicle of street fights...

This is the exciting - yet little known - story of the making of England in the ninth and 10th centuries, the years in which King Alfred, his son and grandson defeated the Danish Vikings who had invaded and occupied three of England's four kingdoms.

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s...