In one of the first twenty-first century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion,...

Dorothee Elmigers bildgewaltiger Roman - eine mitreißende Erfahrung. Wer diesen Text betritt, fällt in den Abgrund unserer Welt und blickt mit aufgerissenen Augen in die Finsternis. Ausgezeichnet mit dem Deutschen Buchpreis, dem Schweizer Buchpreis und dem Bayerischen Buchpreis 2025. Mit blinkenden Warnlichtern fährt die Erzählerin, eine namenlose Schriftstellerin, an den Straßenrand, als ein...

The book, nominated for the Booker Prize, literally exploded onto the domestic book market and acquired not just cult status, but legendary status! A novella in which the theme of growing up is turned upside down and takes on features of surreal humor! A book that hilariously and subtly parodies the very idea of ??a happy childhood. The sensitive and intelligent Sanaev understood everything...

Lyudmila Ulitskaya's novel Daniel Stein, Translator is a literary sensation of recent years. Huge print runs (and this is about writing a complex, far from fiction), controversy, finally, the Big Book award. Daniel Stein (the hero has a specific prototype), with a risk to his life (he is a Jew himself) saves during World War II about three hundred prisoners of the ghetto. At the end of the war,...

The main character of this classic novel, Emil Sinclair, is a young boy raised in a bourgeois home, amidst what is described as a Scheinwelt, a play on words that means 'world of light' as well as 'world of illusion'. Emil's entire existence can be summarized as a struggle between two worlds: the show world of illusion (related to the Hindu concept of maya) and the real world, the world of...

E. Jabbarova's new novel is a branching narrative where the plot lines initially seem unrelated, but ultimately converge. What does it mean to find a home, and what does it mean to lose it? How is a family history formed? What makes people feel closeness and kinship with one another? Grappling with these questions, the characters are in constant, intense motion – in a desperate attempt to...

‘The novel ‘Measuring the World’ fascinatingly, intelligently, and with subtle humor tells the story of two geniuses of the Enlightenment era, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, as typical representatives of the German national character in all its manifestations. These two outstanding men were very different in every respect. While Humboldt traveled almost the entire globe, Gauss...

Dina Rubina is a contemporary prose writer and winner of the Russian ‘Big Book’ award. Her novella ‘On Upper Maslovka Street’ was adapted into a film in 2004, starring Alisa Freindlich and Yevgeny Mironov. This work is largely personal for Rubina. While living in Moscow, the writer and her husband visited Nina Ilyinichna Niss-Goldman, a famous artist. She sculpted portraits of Bryusov, Babel,...

One of the most important novels of our time, which has entered the post-war canon of European literature, was first published in 1959. Its protagonist is the ‘little man’ Oskar Matzerath, whose childhood coincides with the years of the rise of National Socialism. Aware of the absurdity of reality, he decides to stop growing and refuses to become an adult. His constant companion is a tin drum:...

One of the most famous works by the 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. – A disturbing and captivating novel that is impossible to put down. – The story of a small town where the arrival of a strange circus with a giant whale triggers a chain of mysterious events. – The book served as the basis for the legendary film ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ by director Béla Tarr.

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army. Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a...

Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco—among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder,...