Here the first three books of Paustovsky’s epic autobiography - long unavailable in English - appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the front lines of World War I and then as a...

Siddhartha is a novel by Hermann Hesse that deals with the spiritual journey of a boy known as Siddhartha from the Indian subcontinent during the time of Lord Buddha. In a very simple prose, Hesse has conveyed a very profound message for all seekers. A brahmin boy follows his heart and goes through various lives to finally understand what it means to be enlightened. He experiences life as a...

The story is told by a narrator (a lightly fictionalized version of Pushkin's public image), whose tone is educated, worldly, and intimate. The narrator digresses at times, usually to expand on aspects of this social and intellectual world. This allows for a development of the characters and emphasises the drama of the plot despite its relative simplicity. The book is admired for the artfulness...

The Tale of Khoja Nasreddin is a wonderful book that takes pride of place in the treasury of Russian literature, based on the folklore of Central Asia. The adventures of a cheerful, cunning tramp, the hero of many anecdotes, parables, fairy tales, have long gained worldwide fame. Driven by hatred for the greedy rich, fed at the expense of the common people, he uses all sorts of tricks to...

John Steinbeck's cult novel The Grapes of Wrath was first published in America in 1939, received the Pulitzer Prize, and the author himself was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. To date, Grapes of Anger are included in many of the curricula of schools and colleges in the United States. During the Great Depression, a family of ruined farmers is forced to leave their home in Oklahoma....

The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and eventually comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness. A classic piece filled with comedy, its humour lies in its honest depiction of manners, education, marriage and money during the Regency era...

Jane Eyre follows the emotions and experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr. Rochester, the Byronic master of fictitious Thornfield Hall. In its internalisation of the action—the focus is on the gradual unfolding of Jane's moral and spiritual sensibility, and all the events are coloured by a heightened intensity that was previously the domain...

Francis Scott Fitzgerald became the mouthpiece of ideas and the spokesman of the mental mood of youth of the 1920s. Through the lips of the hero of the novel published here - 'On This Side of Paradise' (1920) - he announced that a generation had come for whom 'all the gods died, all wars died out, all faith was undermined.' Fitzgerald was the first to inform the world about the beginning of the...

Considered by many the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece of the German experience during World War I. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. This is the testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the...

The novella tells the story of the life and death, at the age of 45, of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia—a miserable husband, proud father, and upwardly-mobile member of Russia's professional class, the object of Tolstoy's unremitting satire. Living what seems to be a good life, his dreadful relationship with his wife notwithstanding, Ivan Ilyich Golovin bangs his side while putting up...

Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to...