This collection includes two of Dostoevsky's early works - 'Poor People' and 'The Double', which marked the birth of the future great novelist. 'Poor People' is the writer's debut novel.' The touching love story of the petty official Makar Devushkin and Varenka Dobroselova reveals the eternal theme of the 'little man'. Despite the inner beauty and nobility of the soul, they are not able to...

The pressure's really piling up on Greg Heffley. His mom thinks video games are turning his brain to mush, so she wants her son to put down the controller and explore his 'creative side.' As if that's not scary enough, Halloween's just around the corner and the frights are coming at Greg from every angle. When Greg discovers a bag of gummy worms, it sparks an idea. Can he get his mom off his...

The poem 'Odyssey', created by the genius of the legendary epic poet of Ancient Greece Homer, is one of the greatest works of world literature, a creation full of full-blooded life, bright fantasy and poetic brilliance. The dangerous adventures of the cunning and long-suffering Odyssey (he, passionately striving to go home to Ithaca, will have to fight with Poseidon, visit the country of cruel...

Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen away by a figure who claims to come...

Martin Eden, who is semi-autobiographical, is Jack London's most significant and unique creation to date. The story of Martin Eden, a poor fisherman who pursues his goals of higher education and literary success passionately and obsessively, is set in San Francisco. Martin Eden was written as an attack on individuality and a critique of ambition by London, who was dissatisfied with the benefits...

Like many of Dostoyevsky's stories, "White Nights" is told in first person by a nameless narrator; the narrator is living in Saint Petersburg and suffers from loneliness. He gets to know and falls in love with a young woman, but the love remains unrequited as the woman misses her lover with whom she is finally reunited.

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s...

Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

The central place in the narrative is occupied by the ideological dispute between the heroes of the novel. They all went through the war and the Gulag. However, one of them remained a convinced communist. Another, Nerzhin, is convinced of the depravity of the very foundation of the communist system. In the past, he himself was an ardent supporter of it, he experienced a complete collapse of his...

‘The story ‘Cancer Ward’ was conceived by Solzhenitsyn in the summer of 1954 in Tashkent, where, after exile, he was treated at an oncology clinic. Memories of this formed the basis of the story. Her heroes are patients of the ‘cancer ward’. Among them are people of all social classes, ages from all over the vast country. Their destinies reflected the state of Soviet society when, struck by the...

The best cure for blues and depression. Slava Se is the pseudonym of the Latvian author Vyacheslav Soldatenko, who writes in Russian. He is a psychologist by training and works as a plumber. He also plays the guitar, gives concerts in the theater and writes books... Thanks to his good sense of humor and the quality of his literature, his books are very popular.