Best known for the anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted writer of short fiction. The stories she wrote throughout her life reflect her political activism as well as her deep engagement with myth; they are also some of her most formally experimental work. This selection of Seghers’s best stories, written between 1925 and 1965,...

A gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this book offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches...

A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer-'the starched collar,' as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of...

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile,...

Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a functionary realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky;...

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination: Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes...

One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances...

A group of college friends find themselves marooned at a luxurious hotel on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. While their boat is being repaired, they can't help but observe the daily routine of a fellow hotel guest - a mysterious, white-bearded stranger who sits on the veranda each night and smokes one cigarette, sometimes two.

In Letter from an Unknown Woman, the confession of a woman who has loved a famous writer in silence becomes a hymn of devotion and suffering, revealing the fragility of absolute love and the solitude of those destined to be forgotten.

In this book, Rubina accomplished the impossible – she combined three different genres: a gothic novel about dolls and puppeteers, a family detective story, and a psychological drama. Little Petya stole a girl with red-gold curls from a stroller. The child had to be returned to the nanny, but Petya had already made up his mind. This girl would be his main doll. Petya and Liza will be bound...

This book contains seven stories about family. On its pages, you will meet a teenage girl in a yellow cap. She will tell you about street sweepers, golden leaf-fish, and how her father decided to remarry. Her story will be picked up by a boy living with his mother and jealous of her ‘side job.’ Then a character will enter, whose heart is stirred by a past love. Love for a girl who already has...

The new novel by the renowned writer and Hero of the Soviet Union Vladimir Karpov is dedicated to one of the most brilliant and talented commanders of the Great Patriotic War, Army General I.D. Chernyakhovsky. He was loved and respected by everyone – from soldier to general. Decisiveness and integrity, a sharp, quick mind and personal courage, and at the same time openness and warmth in his...