ItÆs the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square cafΘ, everything changes.

One of the most significant East German writers, Brigitte Reimann (1933-1973) wrote irreverent, autobiographical works that addressed issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the GDR. Outspoken and idealistic, she wrote in her diaries that she would rather 'live 30 wild years instead of 70 well-behaved ones.' Considered a master of socialist realism, she heeded the state's call for...

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

‘Count T. heads towards a mysterious area called ‘Optina Pustyn’. Bypassing all sorts of obstacles, he is steadily approaching the goal, however, seeing neither the meaning nor the reasons for his dangerous journey. However, soon he will have to doubt not only the illusory nature his mission, but also in his own reality, and at the same time in the reality of the entire surrounding world. Count...

Strange things are afoot in the cosmopolitan city of Lviv, western Ukraine. Seagulls are circling and the air smells salty, though Lviv is a long way from the sea.

The Island of Crimea was written by Vasily Aksenov in 1977-1979 and was first published in the USA in 1981, after the author left the USSR. A brilliant utopia and at the same time a dystopia, a political satire, a detective story - all this is 'Crimea Island'. The plot of the novel is based on two assumptions: what if Crimea were a full-fledged island and what if during the Civil War it went to...

It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past—a...

The sugary, white Kremlin is the heart of Russia in the 2020s, which survived the Red, Gray and White Troubles, closed off from the outside world and plunged into sleep. its refined copy, but in fact it does not belong to anyone. Fifteen short stories from the collection 'Sugar Kremlin', written as if in completely different ways and about different things, add up to a picture of a ghostly,...