‘A fascinating, gripping story of the confrontation between the fearless young meteorologist Klimenko and the half-mad, brilliant adventurer Bailey, who has learned to liquefy air from the atmosphere and sell the resulting balls of air gas hydrate. Bailey's criminal activity leads to radical climate change. The Earth begins to lose its atmosphere. How can we stop the ‘air seller’ before he...

Schlump, written by Hans Herbert Grimm, was published anonymously in 1928 and was one of the first German novels to describe World War I in all its horror and absurdity, and it remains one of the best. What really sets it apart is its remarkable central character. Who is Schlump? A bit of a rascal and a bit of a sweetheart, a victim of his times, an inveterate survivor, maybe even a new type of...

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.

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...

Yuli Gugolev is a translator and a winner of the Moskovskiy Schyot Prize and the Poetry Prize who has one of the most recognizable poetic voices in Russia now. ‘Orc Fields’ includes poems written after February 2022.

The theme of Hrabal's famous prose is the life of Jan Dítet, a waiter, later a hotelier and finally a traveler during a time of political upheaval. It is a book about Czechness, the greatness and ugliness within us, which was made into a film by Jirí Menzel in 2006.

A worker at a waste paper collection center, Hanta, has worked at a printing press for thirty-five years. He rescues rare books from piles of paper, reads them, and is thus 'educated against his will.' The novella Too Noisy Solitude is Hanta’s inner monologue with many recurring motifs. The reader gets to know Hanta’s first love, Mancinka, and the gypsy Ilonka, who disappeared in a...

The Good Soldier Švejk is one of the most famous and popular characters not only in Czech but also in world literature. This is evidenced by the fact that, along with numerous editions at home and abroad, the work has become a classic in the true sense of the word, which is constantly read and quoted. Perhaps we could also talk about a part of our national character, whether in a good or...

The War with the Newts develops over a long period of time as a collage of newspaper clippings and other brilliantly parodied records about the miraculous Newts who learn to speak, work, and behave like humans, only lacking the ability to think creatively. Behind the seemingly entertaining and witty satire on newspaper sensationalism, what Capek considered the greatest danger to human...

Із самого дитинства ми сприймаємо залізницю не лише як щось, пов’язане із транспортом, а як велику таємницю, що дозволяє вирушити в мандрівку, здолати відстань, долучитися до великого простору, здобути новий досвід. З мандрами й поїздками нерозривно зв’язані й любовні переживання, розлуки та зустрічі, перестук розбитих сердець чи ніжні й тремкі...