Oksana Vasyakina concludes her autofiction trilogy, which began with ‘The Wound’ and ‘The Steppe,’ with a novel in which she attempts to unravel the mystery of her aunt Svetlana's short, almost weightless life. From small fragments of memory, a complex image emerges in which a difficult relationship with her mother, domestic instability, and indifference to her own fate coexist with an...

Oksana Vasyakina's new book consists of 11 short stories about women. In each of these stories, set in the 2000s and 2010s, the heroines drift between rented apartments, Indian hotels, and rooms in central Moscow, unafraid to take risks. The narrator observes how their fates repeatedly hang by a thread; sometimes she intervenes in the course of events, but always remains slightly on the...

The Prophet Almustafa, having lived for twelve years in the alien city of Orphalese, is preparing to return home. Along the way, he is stopped by a group of locals, who are interested in the prophet's views on love and death, freedom and power, good and evil. Almustafa's laconic yet comprehensive reflections are presented in the form of parables. They not only provide answers to the...

A very unusual collection. A very unusual Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is not only (and not so much) tragic, but also ironic, funny, touching, and even sentimental. Dostoevsky of the ‘small form’ is a master of topical plots, comic situations, and witty dialogue.

Viktor Dragunsky's stories about Denis Korablyov were first published in 1960, but children still enjoy reading them. This is hardly surprising, as today's schoolchildren are just like them. They recognize themselves in Dragunsky's characters and, finding themselves in similar situations, behave in exactly the same way. Because Dragunsky's kind, funny, and often instructive stories are...

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. 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...

The summer of 1928 was a vintage season for a growing boy. A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions, of Grandma's belly-busting dinner. It was a summer of sorrows and marvels and gold-fuzzed bees. A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding—remembered forever in moving,...

Brigitte Reimann is a German writer from the GDR. Post-war Germany, the tragic division of the country into two parts, a new generation of young people who received a terrible inheritance from their parents and are trying to build a better country on the ruins—all of this is imbued in the author's work.