Oliver is eleven years old, and he chose his own name after a favorite Dickens character. He loves playing Snake on his phone and eating food ‘like they do in America’; he dreams of defeating the bully Tsapa, being cured of HIV, and finding a real family. But just as his prospective mom and dad arrive from Salt Lake City, TV reports begin predicting the imminent end of the world. Fiction writer...

Alexey Ivanov chronicles Akinfiy Demidov’s battle against this fire demon. Ivanov’s dark Gothic narrative mirrors the course of history. Although 18th-century Russia was an agrarian nation, a new industrial mentality was already taking shape at the Demidov plants. By the 19th century, this mindset had come to dominate the entire industrial Urals, and in the 20th century, it spread across the...

A multitude of different personalities dwell within each of us, yet a rational mind suppresses any attempt they might make to assert their independence. Rosa, the protagonist of Tatyana Shcherbina’s novel, spent many years in a lethargic sleep; it is hardly surprising, then, that she slips back and forth between classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the final years of the USSR. Yet the...

Sergei Dovlatov is one of the most popular and widely-read Russian authors from the end of the twentieth century. His stories, anecdotes and notes have been translated into many languages, adapted to film, and studied in schools and universities. Dovlatov's surprisingly funny yet at times strikingly sad stories have long been considered classics. You will remember his quirky jokes instantly,...

The Soviet and post-Soviet world, with its untold multitude of crimes, is a natural breeding ground for ghost stories. No one writes them more movingly than Russian author Sergei Lebedev, who in this stunning volume probes a collective guilty conscience marked by otherworldliness and the denial of misdeeds. These eleven tales share a mystical topography in which the legacy of totalitarian...

A young university student named Jurek, with no particular ambitions or talents, is adrift. After his doting aunt asks him to perform a small chore, he decides to kill her for no good reason other than, perhaps, boredom. Killing Auntie follows Jurek as he seeks to dispose of the corpse?a task more difficult than one might imagine?and then falls in love with a girl he meets on a train. Can he...

*The Razor’s Edge* is a true study of the mores of early 20th-century European and American society. The novel features perhaps the most vivid characters ever created by Somerset Maugham. Larry Darrell is a young American in search of life’s meaning. Isabel, his fiancée, faces a difficult choice between love and wealth, social convention and the desire to live life on her own terms. Elliott...

What strange Bolivian virus sparked an epidemic in a Russian village? Where did the crystal pyramids found in the snow—amidst fields and forests—come from? Who are the *vitaminders*, living their own distinct lives in houses made of self-generating felt? And how will the story of the rural doctor Garin’s journey unfold—a journey that began during a blizzard at a tiny station where horses were...

A story about the time when desires are still alive but one’s strength is already waning—and about a strange, almost mystical love that overtakes a man at the end of a wasted life filled with dreary work and tawdry, casual sex.

Simón Bolívar. The Liberator, the greatest hero of the War of Independence, a legendary figure. A ruler who voluntarily relinquished power. Only recently, he had commanded armies and held sway over nations, and then, suddenly—resignation. The final months of Bolívar’s life are a period about which historians know almost nothing. Yet, under the pen of the greatest master of magical realism,...

*The Alchemist* is the most famous novel by Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho and a beloved book for millions of people around the world. In their youth, people are not afraid to dream; everything seems possible to them. But as time passes, a mysterious force begins to suggest that their desires are unattainable.

— For all fans of the famous novel *Gone with the Wind*. — A cult family saga set in Australia and New Zealand between 1915 and 1969. — The best-selling book in the history of Australian literature. — The novel’s total print run exceeds 33 million copies. — The novel has been adapted for both screen and stage; the 1983 miniseries became the second most popular American miniseries in television...