By turns lyrical and philosophical, witty and baffling, A School for Fools confounds all expectations of the novel. Here we find not one reliable narrator but two ‘unreliable’ narrators: the young man who is a student at the ‘school for fools’ and his double. What begins as a reverie (with frequent interruptions) comes to seem a sort of fairy-tale quest not for gold or marriage but for...

Als »ein Volksstück und die Parodie dazu« bezeichnete Alfred Polgar Ödön von Horváths Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald. Mit dem Kleist-Preis ausgezeichnet, wurde Horváths Volksstück 1931 an Max Reinhardts Deutschem Theater in Berlin unter der Regie von Heinz Hilpert uraufgeführt, »das bitterste, das bitterböseste Stück neuer Literatur«, wie Kurt Pinthus schrieb. In der New York Times war zu...

Set against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and...

Zweig's early story was written in 1913 and was published in the same year, but is published here in the 1925 bookprint version revised by its author, which Zweig has 'shortened by numerous passages that were obviously too 'expressive' from his later point of view,' according to the author Editor Michael Scheffel. Zweig masterfully captured the oppressive atmosphere of the story, in which the...

The Stranger is the debut work of a young writer, a kind of creative manifesto. The concept of absolute freedom is the main postulate of this manifesto. The hero of this story is on trial for a murder he committed for the most stupid of all possible reasons. And this is the truth that the hero is not afraid to throw in the face of his judges, go against everything, forget about all conventions...

A lonely old man and a tender puppy met and became friends. 'Warm friendship and devotion became happiness, because everyone understood everyone and each did not demand more from the other than what he could give.' But grief happened - and the dog was left alone, though among people, and went in search of a beloved owner.

The comedy of A.S. Griboedov 'Woe from Wit' was already written over a century and a half ago, but a picturesque picture of morals, a gallery of living types and eternally sharp irony still excite and captivate readers, teach them dignity and nobility. The true peak of Russian drama at the beginning of the 19th century, the play Woe from Wit, has been known to us since school years. But today...

'The Fall of the House of Usher' describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past.

The Glass Bead Game is an ultra-aesthetic game which is played by the scholars, creamed off in childhood and nurtured in elite schools, in the province of Castalia. The Master of the Glass Bead Game, Joseph Knecht, holds the most exalted office in Castalia. He personifies the detachment, serenity and aesthetic vision which reward a life dedicated to perfection of the intellect. But can, indeed...

The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by. In every sense an international figure, Joyce was faithful to his own country...

Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a...