In Cecil the Lion Had to Die, Olena Stiazhkina follows these families through radical transformations when the Soviet Union unexpectedly implodes, independent Ukraine emerges, and neoimperial Russia occupies Ukraine’s Crimea and parts of the Donbas. Just as Stiazhkina’s decision to transition to writing in Ukrainian as part of her civic stance-performed in this book that begins in Russian and...

Written in a variety of literary forms, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender captures the shattered world of a life in exile. Some chapters re-create the daily journal of the narrator's lonely and alienated mother, who shops at the improvised flea-markets in town and longs for her children; another is a dream-like narrative in which a circle of women friends are visited by an angel. There are...

First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is...

Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, Zhadan honors the memory of the lost and addresses the living, inviting us to consider what language can offer to a country threatened with...

Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested,...

Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in ‘Little Fable’ to the absurd humor of ‘Investigations of a Dog,’ from the elaborate waking nightmare of ‘Building the Great Wall of China’ to the...

While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness.

It’s not Avi’s fault, it’s those sourish, mind-bending little berries that are to blame, those tiny wee spheres. Bilberries, bletherberries that befuddle the mind, babbleberries that give you a kick. The beautiful green forest scales, the timber songs, play out like a kaleidoscope before his eyes. It’s hard tae breathe, yer haunds skedaddle awa… In a camp at the edge of a forest children are...

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.

The Petersburg Stories constitute Gogol's finest work, on which his fame is justly based. The plays included in this volume are 'The Government Inspector' and 'The Marriage'.

Антиутопия, которую заслуженно ставят в один ряд с такими знаковыми романами, как '451° по Фаренгейту' Рэя Брэдбери и 'О дивный новый мир' Олдоса Хаксли. Участник межзвездной экспедиции Эл Брегг возвращается на Землю через 127 лет после отлета - представьте, что сегодня очнулся человек из 80-х годов девятнадцатого века, - и попадает в прекрасный новый мир. Мир, где нет старости и болезней, нет...

Экспедиция на Венеру. Этот рейд полон опасностей: планетолет «Хиус» прежде не испытывали в таких тяжелых атмосферных условиях, аномальное геологическое месторождение «Урановая Голконда» недоступно для подхода транспорта, да и загадка гибели предыдущих экспедиций не может не тревожить отважных исследователей.