This is a book in which Valentin Kataev cites episodes from his own biography, paints a panorama of Russian literary life in the twenties of the twentieth century in broad masks and shares many details about many famous writers and poets whom he met during his long and eventful life. Among the heroes of the book - naturally, under recognizable pseudonyms - are Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yuri Olesha,...

Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia's best-regarded writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to craft stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Rich in comparison but devoid of cheap sentiment, Osipov's fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait...

What does a Labrador think about when his owner drinks wine and cries? How can dogs help with promotion at work, save from bullies and shake the nervous system of the owner? What does your beloved pet think about your exes? What is the secret of the success of a not very smart and not even the most formidable dog, in front of which a huge Rottweiler trembles?

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical...

November 11, 1918. Leutnant Alois Pokora leaves the hospital and enters the streets of rebellious Berlin. The old world has ended.La Belle Époque died in the trenches of World War I. A new world is born in pain: on the Western Front and during the revolution that swept through defeated Germany.

Konrad Widuch, who comes from Upper Silesia, is a veteran of the Great War, a communist who is wholeheartedly devoted to the revolution. After the war, he and Karol Radek go to Soviet Russia and implement the proletarian order, fighting in the ranks of the Konarmia in the war of 1920. However, the revolution devours its own children. During the purges of 1937, comrade Widuch is arrested,...

Let's say that Erwin Piontek, a 73-year-old miner, is going on a voyage around the world. On an old Venus-class sailing yacht, with a worn-out rubber oilskin, a red woolen cap, a scout compass in a sailing bag and meticulously calculated provisions, he is prepared for a solo expedition. He has an ambitious plan to never put into port, for the entire twenty-nine thousand miles.

Beautiful cars, women, cold vodka and hot blood. Boxing, slums and luxurious brothels, the mud of Wola and the elegant streets of ródmiecie. Jews and Poles. The ghetto benches and street fights. The ethnic, social, religious and political melting pot of Warsaw in 1937. And above all divisions, the rules of the gangster world, where strength is the most valuable currency.

Konstanty Willemann, a Varsovian, but the son of a German aristocrat and a Polonized Silesian woman, cares little for patriotic slogans and traditions sanctified by the blood of heroic soldiers. He is a cynic, a scoundrel and a bon vivant. An unfaithful husband and a bad father. Konstanty reluctantly takes part in the September campaign, and after its defeat, he also becomes a member of a...

France, 1685. The Sun King establishes Catholicism as the only legal religion. Huguenot groups cross the country to reach the north, where they hope to find a new homeland

One of Olga Tokarczuk's most famous and widely read novels, translated into thirty languages. Prawiek – a village in central Poland – brings together the fates of generations of several families, where everyday life intertwines with the extraordinary, reality with myth.

Three stories, three ways of coming to terms with death in one of Olga Tokarczuk's most moving novels.