In a near future, the air pollution is so bad that everyone wears gas masks. The infant mortality rate is soaring, and birth defects, new diseases, and physical ailments of all kinds abound. The water is undrinkable—unless you’re poor and have no choice. Large corporations fighting over profits from gas masks, drinking water, and clean food tower over an ineffectual, corrupt government.

The Tokyo-Montana Express is a 1980 collection of 131 short stories by Richard Brautigan, written while he was dividing his time between Japan and Montana. The book is structured as a train journey, with each chapter representing a ‘station’ that offers brief, often surreal, vignettes blending the cultures of Tokyo and Montana, showcasing Brautigan's signature mix of humor, melancholy, and...

By the time Frances Hodgson Burnett began writing ‘The Secret Garden,’ she had already built a highly successful literary career spanning several decades. She had several highly successful books to her name, the most successful of which, ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ sold hundreds of thousands of copies on both sides of the Atlantic. However, none of the author's previous works could compare in...

This collection includes two books by Baudelaire: ‘Prose Poems’ and the programmatic ‘The Flowers of Evil,’ which brought the author widespread international fame. This manifesto of French symbolism was first published in 1857 and caused a stormy public reaction. For the poet, the scandal ended with a court fine, the book's circulation was seized, and the most ‘indecent’ poems were removed...

‘Man has a need for something immense – for infinity and wonder – and he is right not to be content with less and not to feel at home in the world until this need is satisfied,’ – perhaps this phrase from one of Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, more than any other, reveals the essence of the great artist's soul, forever wandering along the path of searching for perfection....

Where neither the police, nor a certified psychiatrist, nor a Cambridge professor can help you, Dirk Gently's detective agency steps in – the leading expert on divorce cases, missing cats, and aliens from other worlds. Who better than him to answer the most complex questions of our time: What do a cat and Coleridge have in common with quantum mechanics and a Chesterfield sofa? Can a deceased...

Even during his lifetime, Albert Camus was called the ‘Conscience of the West,’ and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for ‘his important literary work, which with clear seriousness illuminates the problems of human conscience in our time.’ Camus's rejection of cruelty and violence is evident in both his life and his works. In his essay ‘Reflections on the Guillotine,’ published when capital...

Born into a Jewish family and a communist, Anna Seghers immediately attracted the attention of the Gestapo after Hitler came to power. Her books were burned, and the writer herself was forced to emigrate to France, becoming a staunch opponent of the Nazi regime. With the outbreak of war, Seghers spent a year in Marseille waiting for a visa to Mexico. The novel ‘Transit’ is largely based on...

First published in 1951, before the achievement of space flight, Arthur C. Clarke created this visionary tale. Renowned science fiction writer Martin Gibson joins the spaceship Ares, the world’s first interplanetary ship for passenger travel, on its maiden voyage to Mars. His mission: to report back to the home planet about the new Mars colony and the progress it has been making.

The right of nations to self-determination is what formed the basis of the USSR and what ultimately led to its collapse. But what did the founder of the USSR think about the national question? This collection includes works by V.I. Lenin: ‘On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,’ ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question,’ ‘On the National Pride of the Great Russians,’ and others.

Pushkin's great novel in verse, ‘Eugene Onegin,’ seems simple and straightforward, but this is deceptive. In reality, its text holds many mysteries, the meaning of which often eludes the modern reader. Numerous allusions, hidden references, a multitude of people, concepts, and objects that were obvious to people of that era but are now unknown to the general public – all this does not...

Lotte in Weimar’ is an elegant and captivating novel by the great Thomas Mann, in which profound reflections on the artist, his often painful existence in the real world, and the true meaning of life are closely intertwined with an interesting and slightly ironic plot – a meeting in Weimar between the aging and celebrated Goethe and his former beloved... Did this meeting actually happen? And...