Nine-year-old Mathias is constantly haunted by dreams of the Silent Lady—she does him no harm, yet she appears every night, watching him with a sorrowful gaze and remaining utterly mute; now, he is terrified to fall asleep. Exhausted and desperate, his parents turn to Pietro Gerber—a Florentine hypnotist specializing in trauma therapy for children. Gerber agrees to help, only to find himself...

In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic fantasies disguises profound loneliness and estrangement from living life. A Gentle Creature and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man show how withdrawal from...

A monumental new translation—the first in more than twenty years—of Russia’s greatest family drama, rendered with all the passion, humor, and soul of the original.

Aschenbach has always lived a life of structured routine, but he has begun to be troubled by diminishing creative inspiration from his strict writing schedule. While walking in a cemetery north of Munich, he has a dizzying vision which prompts him to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural...

An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a...

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under...

Three by Tsvetaeva collects three dazzling and devastating reckonings with love and the end of love by a poet celebrated for the unequaled verbal inventiveness and emotional intensity of her work. ‘Backstreets,’ translated into English for the first time, is a retelling of a Russian fairy tale that offers a witches’ brew of temptation, bodily transformation, marriage, and murder. ‘Poem of the...

An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation...

Everyone knows that Nick and Charlie love their nearly inseparable life together. But soon Nick will be leaving for university, and Charlie, a year younger, will be left behind. Everyone's asking if they're staying together, which is a stupid question... or at least that's what Nick and Charlie assume at first. As the time to say goodbye gets inevitably closer, both Nick and Charlie start to...

Charlie zdecydowanie zbyt wczesnie doswiadcza okrucienstw losu. Ukochany ojciec popelnia samobójstwo, a dziewczynka nie znajduje oparcia w pograzonej w zalobie i niemocy matce. Zostaje sama z lekiem i bólem, z ciezarem nie do udzwigniecia. Ucieka w glab siebie, milknie i wraz z uplywem lat staje sie calkowicie samotna, smutna dziewczyna.

In the early 1920s, the poet and prose writer Konstantin Vaginov was a member of Gumilev’s ‘Guild of Poets,’ followed by stints in the literary groups ‘The Islanders’ and ‘The Ring of Poets,’ and eventually the poetry section of OBERIU. He authored four books of remarkable poetry and four novels; the first of these—*Goat Song*—earned Vaginov a reputation as a subtle, witty, and highly...