Alma/Oneworld

Ivan Bunin's first published work, The Village is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centering on episodes in the lives of two peasant brothers — characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human — it reveals the pettiness, violence and ignorance of life on the land.

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby's impossible love for a married woman emerge, until events spiral into tragedy.

While holidaying at a villa on the French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy American couple, meet the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Her arrival causes a stir in their social circle and exposes the cracks in their fragile marriage. As their relationship unravels, the glimpses of their troubled past emerge, and a series of disturbing events unfolds.

This Side of Paradise charts the life of Amory Blaine, an ambitious young man loosely based on Fitzgerald himself, as he moves from his well-heeled Midwest home to study at Princeton and then starts frequenting the circles of high society as an aspiring writer. Experiencing failure and frustration in love and in his career, Blaine finds his youthful enthusiasm gradually giving way to disillusionment, cynicism and a life of dissolution.

The heir to his grandfather's considerable fortune, Anthony Patch is led astray from the path to gainful employment by the temptations and distractions of the 1920s Jazz Age. His descent into dissolution and profligacy is accelerated by his marriage to the attractive but turbulent Gloria, and the couple soon discover the dangerous flip side of a life of glamour and debauchery.

Professor Persikov, an eccentric zoologist, stumbles upon a new light ray that accelerates growth and reproduction rates in living organisms. In the wake of a plague that has decimated the country's poultry stocks, Persikov's discovery is exploited as a means to correct the problem. As foreign agents, the state and the Soviet media all seize upon the red ray, matters get out of hand...

The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol's humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase suddenly take on a bizarre life of their own. The second story, Ivan Krylov's Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather, has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner whose actions prove him to be otherwise. The final two stories, by the Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, are satirical attacks on the inability of civil servants to cope with real life, and on Russia's autocracy. Together, they represent some of Russia's finest comic writing before the twentieth century.

A wide-ranging Russian novel dealing with the ideas of language, power, and national identity, this comic and thought-provoking work has tremendous relevance to the present day In a world a few decades from now, Russia has descended into a farcical civil war. With an extreme right-wing cult in power, racial tensions have divided the country into the Varangians — those who consider themselves to be the original Aryan settlers of Russia — and the Khazars, the liberals and Jews driven out of Moscow by recent events. Morale has reached an all-time low as the brutality and pointlessness of the situation is becoming more and more apparent. What is left of the fighting now revolves around capturing and recapturing Degunino, a seemingly magical village with an abundance of pies, vodka, and accommodating womenfolk. But there is also a third people — timid, itinerant, and on the brink of extinction — who lay claim to Degunino and Russia as their homeland. Against this rich backdrop of events, this story follows the lives of four couples struggling to escape the chaos and stupidity of the war around them: a teenage girl who adopts a homeless man, a poet turned general separated from his lover, a provincial governor in love with one of the natives, and a legendary military commander who is sleeping with the enemy.

McCarthy's debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great effect that the narrative's pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who suffers memory loss as the result of an accident that «involved something falling from the sky», receives an £8.5 million settlement and uses the money to re-enact, with the help of a «facilitator» he hires, things remembered or imagined. He buys an apartment building to replicate one that has come to him in a vision and then populates it with people hired to re-enact, over and over again, the mundane activities he has seen his imaginary neighbors performing. He stages both ordinary acts (the fixing of a punctured tire) and violent ones (shootings and more), each time repeating the events many times and becoming increasingly detached from reality and fascinated by the scenarios his newfound wealth has allowed him to create — even though he professes he doesn't «want to understand them». McCarthy's evocation of the narrator's absorption in his fantasy world as it cascades out of control is brilliant all the way through the abrupt climax.

Several years after emigrating from the USSR, the author discovers the battered suitcase he had brought with him gathering dust at the back of a wardrobe. As he opens the suitcase, the seemingly undistinguished items he finds inside take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them. A poplin shirt evokes the bittersweet story of courtship and marriage, a pair of boots calls up the hilarious conclusion to an official banquet, two pea-green crepe socks bring back memories of his partly successful attempt to become a black-market racketeer, while a double-breasted suit reminds him of when he was approached by the KGB to spy on a Swedish writer.

Using a sharply realistic and humorous style, Bulgakov reveals his doubts about his own competence and the immense burden of responsibility, as he deals with a superstitious and poorly educated people struggling to enter the modern age. This acclaimed collection represents some of Bulgakov's most personal and insightful observations on youth, isolation and progress.

The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, Berlin). The letters, here published for the first time, display much of Lampedusa's distinctive style present in his later work; not only the razor sharp introspection, but also a wicked sense of humor, playful in its description of the comedie humaine. United and underpinned by the genre of the novel, Lampedusa's lifetime obsession, some letters also read like excerpts from a Stendhalian travel journal, whilst others are pickwickian adventures populated with comic, exaggerated personalities.

When Sofia Behrs married Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of «War and Peace», husband and wife regularly exchanged diaries covering the years from 1862 to 1910. Sofia's life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history: the transition from old feudal Russia to the three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy's own life story, the study of one woman's private experience, that the diaries are most valuable and moving. They are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and to remain indomitable. It contains a forward by Doris Lessing.

A tale of intrigue, deception, murder and retribution, Boris Godunov charts the rise and fall of an ambitious prince who cannot avoid facing the consequences of his dark past. Based on the historical figure of the nobleman Boris Godunov, who seized power from Ivan the Terrible's successor in sixteenth-century Russia, and partly inspired by Shakespeare's Macbeth, Alexander Pushkin's 1825 play showcases the author's mastery of verse and dramatic form. Also included in this volume are Pushkin's celebrated four Little Tragedies: Mozart and Salieri, The Miserly Knight, The Stone Guest and A Feast During the Plague.

In Bulgakov's Diaboliad, the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the First Central Depot for the Materials for Matches, and tries to seek out his newly assigned superior Kalsoner, responsible for his dismissal. His quest through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy takes on the increasingly surreal dimensions of a nightmare. This early satirical story, reminiscent of Gogol and Dostoevsky, was first published in 1924 and incurred the wrath of pro-Soviet critics. Along with the three other stories in this volume which also feature explorations of the absurd and bizarre, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the artistic development of the author of Master and Margarita.

Using the credit card and identity of a handcuffs salesman, professional failure Tyndale Corbett arrives in Miami for a law enforcement conference to discover the joys of luxury hotels and above all the delight of being someone else, someone successful.

One of Tolstoy's last works of fiction, «The Devil» revolves around the young landowner's Yevgeny irrepressible lust for Stepanida, a sensual peasant woman. Even when he gets married to a respectable upper-class lady, he finds himself unable to put an end to his encounters with Stepanida, and becomes increasingly consumed by guilt and helplessness in the face of his undeniable urges. In some ways comparable to the controversial «Kreutzer Sonata», this novella shows Tolstoy at his most salacious, while at the same time addressing the conflicts between desire, social norms and personal conscience. Also included in this volume is «Family Happiness», one Tolstoy's earliest works, an entertaining and cynical account of marriage from the perspective of a disillusioned wife.

In 1864, Lewis Carroll sent Alice's Adventures under Ground, a handwritten and illustrated manuscript, as a gift to Alice Liddell, the daughter of his Oxford dean. This formed the basis for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland — introducing timeless characters such as Alice, the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts and the Gryphon — although it differs considerably from the later work, with the author himself approving its publication in 1886. Alice's Adventures under Ground provides an enchanting glimpse into Carroll's imaginative process, and deserves to be ranked as a classic for all ages in its own right.

Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism, this title follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond.

As a mysterious gentleman and self-proclaimed magician arrives in Moscow, followed by a most bizarre retinue of servants — which includes a strangely dressed ex-choirmaster, a fanged hitman and a mischievous tomcat with the gift of the gab — the Russian literary world is shaken to its foundations. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil, and that he has come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of the disbelieving capital. But the Devil's mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master — the author of an unpublished historical novel about Pontius Pilate — who has turned his back on real life and his lover Margarita, finding shelter in a lunatic asylum after traumatic publishers' rejections, vilification in the press and political persecution. Will the Devil manage to enlist the fiery Margarita into his ranks, will she remain faithful to the Master to the very end and come to his rescue? At the same time, a satirical romp and a daring analysis of the nature of good and evil, innocence and guilt, «The Master and Margarita» is the crowning achievement of one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century. This new translation by Hugh Aplin is based on the recently restored, unexpurgated edition, which benefits from over three decades of Bulgakov scholarship.

Considered one of the most influential authors of twentieth century Russian Literature, Ivan Bunin's «Dark Avenues» is the culmination of a life's work which unrelentingly questioned of the political doxa whilst taking his poetic mastery of language to dark new heights. Written between 1938 and 1944 and set in the context of a disintegrating Russian culture, this collection of short fiction centres around dark, erotic liaisons told with a rich, elegaic poetics which probes the artistic limits of depicting desire.A prolific writer and fierce political activist, Bunin became the first Russian to win the Nobel prize for Literature in 1933 and was highly influential on his contemporary Russian emigres, Checkov and Nabokov. The «Dark Avenues» is the zenith of his work and one of the most important Russian texts to come out of the twentieth century.

Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma — what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throw-away little exchanges that make up our lives. Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published, and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men and women — a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac, like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture of 1960s America. It's a spirit that still lives.

Anna Akhmatova is identified, along with Osip Mandelmstam, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva, as one of the four leading poets of twentieth-century Russian literature. Her poetry, classically rhymed and metered but also laconic and highly elliptical, is deeply engaged with predecessors such as Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Dostoevsky, Annensky, and above all Pushkin, and also with contemporaries Mandelstram, T.S. Eliot, and Gumilev, her husband, who was persecuted and finally executed by Stalin. The poems collected, including the masterworks Requiem and Poem without a Hero, conjure intimations of the infinite and profound emotional depth through meditations on the perception of everyday objects and evocative settings, forming a powerful record of spiritual resilience. With introductory essays by Walter Arndt, acclaimed translator of Russian literature, and translations by Arndt, Robin Kemball, and Carl R. Proffer, this volume provides the most authoritative and readable versions of Akhmatovas poetry in English.

This is the widely acclaimed translation of one of the outstanding and seminal works of Russian literature. Pushkin's novel in verse has influenced Russian prose as well as poetry since its completion nearly 175 years ago. By turns brilliant, entertaining, romantic, and serious, it traces the development of a young Petersburg dandy as he deals with life and love. Influenced by Byron, Pushkin reveals the nature of his heroes through the emotional colourations found in their witty remarks, nature descriptions, and unexpected actions, all conveyed in stanzas of sonnet length (a form that became known as the Onegin Stanza), faithfully reproduced by Walter Arndt in this prize-winning translation. Includes extensive introduction, notes, and four critical essays.