Lyudmila Ulitskaya's novel Daniel Stein, Translator is a literary sensation of recent years. Huge print runs (and this is about writing a complex, far from fiction), controversy, finally, the Big Book award. Daniel Stein (the hero has a specific prototype), with a risk to his life (he is a Jew himself) saves during World War II about three hundred prisoners of the ghetto. At the end of the war,...

The main character of this classic novel, Emil Sinclair, is a young boy raised in a bourgeois home, amidst what is described as a Scheinwelt, a play on words that means 'world of light' as well as 'world of illusion'. Emil's entire existence can be summarized as a struggle between two worlds: the show world of illusion (related to the Hindu concept of maya) and the real world, the world of...

When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to her remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made more difficult by the intervention of a host of deadly supernatural creatures and a murder detective on her tail. Can Elina catch the pike and put to rest the curse that has been...

E. Jabbarova's new novel is a branching narrative where the plot lines initially seem unrelated, but ultimately converge. What does it mean to find a home, and what does it mean to lose it? How is a family history formed? What makes people feel closeness and kinship with one another? Grappling with these questions, the characters are in constant, intense motion – in a desperate attempt to...

Thirteen contemporary writers writing in Russian have created thirteen short stories about the customs and traditions in their cultures: diverse, yet nevertheless based on the same phenomena and processes. Coming of age (for example, through a computer game, as in Dasha Blagova's story), choosing a profession (becoming a shepherd or a vlogger, as in Islam Khanipaev's text), marriage (between...

Of Human Bondage is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham's novels. It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love and adventure. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, Philip settles in London to train as a doctor. And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a...

‘The novel ‘Measuring the World’ fascinatingly, intelligently, and with subtle humor tells the story of two geniuses of the Enlightenment era, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, as typical representatives of the German national character in all its manifestations. These two outstanding men were very different in every respect. While Humboldt traveled almost the entire globe,...

Dina Rubina is a contemporary prose writer and winner of the Russian ‘Big Book’ award. Her novella ‘On Upper Maslovka Street’ was adapted into a film in 2004, starring Alisa Freindlich and Yevgeny Mironov. This work is largely personal for Rubina. While living in Moscow, the writer and her husband visited Nina Ilyinichna Niss-Goldman, a famous artist. She sculpted portraits of Bryusov,...

One of the most important novels of our time, which has entered the post-war canon of European literature, was first published in 1959. Its protagonist is the ‘little man’ Oskar Matzerath, whose childhood coincides with the years of the rise of National Socialism. Aware of the absurdity of reality, he decides to stop growing and refuses to become an adult. His constant companion is a tin...

One of the most famous works by the 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in literature. – A disturbing and captivating novel that is impossible to put down. – The story of a small town where the arrival of a strange circus with a giant whale triggers a chain of mysterious events. – The book served as the basis for the legendary film ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ by director Béla Tarr.

Sergey Lebedev's collection of short stories, ‘Titan,’ is about the fact that nothing and no one disappears without a trace. Why don't birds peck at ripe apples, but flies swarm to them as if they were meat? Why does a dog whimper as if a person is groaning? Why is the grandmother a behemoth, even though she eats lean and bland food? And why does she have iron teeth? In Lebedev's stories,...

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army. Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras,...