This is a book in which Valentin Kataev cites episodes from his own biography, paints a panorama of Russian literary life in the twenties of the twentieth century in broad masks and shares many details about many famous writers and poets whom he met during his long and eventful life. Among the heroes of the book - naturally, under recognizable pseudonyms - are Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yuri...

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukranian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of...

The Cyberiad - an amusing mix of traditional fairy tales and science fiction literature with constructors in the role of sorcerers and miracles that are only an incredibly developed engineering skill - is a kind of warning against the lack of moderation, ethics and excessive faith in the omnipotence of engineering.

The hero of The Star Diaries, Ijon Tichy, like Gulliver, communes with various extraterrestrial beings. During his numerous interplanetary journeys, the traveler has met various alien civilizations, created by both sentient beings and advanced robots.

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical...

In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a ‘sissy’ by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine...

Seventeen-year-old Evie Beckham has always been too occupied with her love of math and frequent battles with anxiety to want to date. Besides, she’s always found the idea of kissing to be kind of weird. But by senior year, thanks to therapy and her friends, she’s feeling braver than before. Maybe even brave enough to enter the national math and physics competition or flirt back with the new...

November 11, 1918. Leutnant Alois Pokora leaves the hospital and enters the streets of rebellious Berlin. The old world has ended.La Belle Époque died in the trenches of World War I. A new world is born in pain: on the Western Front and during the revolution that swept through defeated Germany.

Konrad Widuch, who comes from Upper Silesia, is a veteran of the Great War, a communist who is wholeheartedly devoted to the revolution. After the war, he and Karol Radek go to Soviet Russia and implement the proletarian order, fighting in the ranks of the Konarmia in the war of 1920. However, the revolution devours its own children. During the purges of 1937, comrade Widuch is arrested,...

Let's say that Erwin Piontek, a 73-year-old miner, is going on a voyage around the world. On an old Venus-class sailing yacht, with a worn-out rubber oilskin, a red woolen cap, a scout compass in a sailing bag and meticulously calculated provisions, he is prepared for a solo expedition. He has an ambitious plan to never put into port, for the entire twenty-nine thousand miles.

Konstanty Willemann, a Varsovian, but the son of a German aristocrat and a Polonized Silesian woman, cares little for patriotic slogans and traditions sanctified by the blood of heroic soldiers. He is a cynic, a scoundrel and a bon vivant. An unfaithful husband and a bad father. Konstanty reluctantly takes part in the September campaign, and after its defeat, he also becomes a member of a...

France, 1685. The Sun King establishes Catholicism as the only legal religion. Huguenot groups cross the country to reach the north, where they hope to find a new homeland