Eva never really wanted to be a mother. And certainly not the mother of a boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much–adored teacher in a school shooting two days before his sixteenth birthday. Neither nature nor nurture exclusively shapes a child's character. But Eva was always uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood. Did...

The adventures of New Alice - an 11-year-old modern Russian girl Marusya Mendeleeva - in the underwater empire of Tsar-Dna. Funny! Creepy! Nice and cool. Marusya's first love. Decline of the underwater empire. Extraordinary passions and villainy of adults. There are many native Russian motifs (Saltykov-Shchedrin is resting). Who is Pink Mouse? It's a big secret. A book for adults!

From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century—a novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.

Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a...

Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935....

One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the...

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its...

‘This novel is consistently witty, highly associative, with elements of dystopia, funny and bitter, sarcastic and sometimes cynical, imbued with humor, irony and, most importantly, self-irony, which is the best means of self-defense, will not let you get bored. And as you know, long live any genre, except the sad one!’ Vladimir Orlov

The very first novel of the writer - ‘The Former Son’ - tells about a young man who was injured in a terrible stampede on Nemiza and was in a coma for 10 years. He was looked after by his grandmother, who, in turn, tried to see the world through the eyes of her grandson, to tell him everything when he recovered. She tells, and the reader remembers what Belarusians experienced during that...

The novel begins with the events of June 23, 1941, when the offensive of the German army launched another wave of the fight against spies in the USSR. The work immerses the reader in the atmosphere of the 1930s and is based on the materials of the investigative case of the first director of the Moscow crematorium, Pyotr Ilyich Nesterenka, through whose testimony and diaries one can trace the...

Ein Klassiker der 1930er-Jahre-Literatur, neu entdeckt: das Schicksal einer klugen und ehrgeizigen Frau als Bankangestellte in der Weltwirtschaftskrise

War is powerless before love. It appears in spite of everything and gives strength for sake. Then you can survive anything: capture, injury, hundreds of kilometers of distance, sleepless nights. Age, gender, fear become just words that have no meaning. And even when love multiplied by two has to be carried through life alone together with the pain of loss, it does not disappear.