In translation
Books are purchased through Amazon UK. Link opens in a new window.
War and Peace
War and Peace is one of the richest novels ever written. Tolstoy's enthralling epic combines history and fiction in his depiction of Russia's lengthy war with the French armies of Napoleon and its effects on the domestic lives of those caught up in the conflict. He creates some of the most vital and involving characters in literature as he follows the rise and fall of families in St Petersburg and Moscow who are linked by their personal and political relationships. His heroes are the thoughtful yet impulsive Pierre Bezukhov, his intelligentand ambitious friend, Prince Andrei, and the woman who becomes indispensable to both of them, the enchanting Natasha Rostova. Stunningly translated with remarkable fidelity to the all-important tone of Tolstoy's original, and including an introduction, notes, a chapter summary and an index of historical figures, this edition of War and Peace is destined to become the definitive English translation for our time.
Institute Benjamenta (Extraordinary Classics)
Published in 1908, the novel is a notebook, a boy?s impressions of life at the school for servants run by the brother and sister Benjamenta. The lesson of the school is humility and the rejection of power and ambition. It is a lesson that the narrator, Jakob von Gunten, learns well. From his vantage point, he is able to see through the absurd posturings of his fellow students. Like his creation Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser understood of the attractions of infinitesimal smallness and kept well away from the corruptions and temptations of literary life. An outsider who spent his last twenty-seven years in an asylum, Walser was a writer?s writer whose work was much admired by Kafka, Hesse and Mann. His voice appeals to all those who savour silence in an epoch of deafening noise. Now a major feature film directed by the Quay Brothers, Institute Benjamenta is Walser?s masterpiece. Ninety years after its first publication, this edition offers the chance to read a truly extraordinary classic.
The Devil in the Flesh
The Devil in the Flesh, one of the finest, most delicate love stories ever written, is set in Paris during the last year of the First World War. The narrator, a boy of sixteen, tells of his love affair with Martha Lacombe, a young woman whose soldier husband is away at the Front. The liaison soon becomes a scandal and their friends, horrified and incredulous, refuse to accept what is happening - even when the affair reaches its tragic climax. In the film Le Diable au Corps (with Gerard Philipe and Micheline Presle), Claude Autant-Lara recreated this story of the First World War with nostalgic tenderness. His sensitive dramatization treats the affair with such delicacy that many critics consider the love scenes to be among the most beautiful ever photographed. The film won the Grand Prix and the International Critics Prize.
Love in a Fallen City: And Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)
Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.
The Age of Flowers (Pushkin modern edition)
In a white city on the African shore of the Mediterranean, the Islamic fundamentalists are gaining control of the streets and the European community of artists and decadent aristocrats take refuge in memories and innumerable barely-recognised vices. Luca and Irene, a young couple, are accepted into this decaying and malicious ex-patriot society because of Irene's family money. On learning that his wife has breast cancer, Luca becomes obsessed with the memory of his mother who died of the same illness, and escapes into the only world in which he feels secure, his garden, to which he devotes himself with the desperate passion of one threatened by the entire world. There he remains ignorant of the intrigues of his friends and acquaintances, untouched by Irene's illness and her distance. He immerses himself ever more deeply in his dream, becoming more and more like the city's inhabitants who are rushing towards corruption and destruction.
Sunflower (New York Review Books Classics)
Gyula Krúdy is a marvelous writer who haunted the taverns of Budapest and lived on its streets while turning out a series of mesmerizing, revelatory novels that are among the masterpieces of modern literature. Krúdy conjures up a world that is entirely his own—dreamy, macabre, comic, and erotic—where urbane sophistication can erupt without warning into passion and madness.
Fists
Three stories, three portraits of young men learning the realities of adult life. Boxing takes us into the world of gyms, a world of bodies, of nerves stretched to the limit, of sacrifice and challenge. Two young men confront each other in the fight of their lives. One of them is well-to-do, a model student whose skills have never been put to the test. The other, although poor and deaf, is stubborn and determined . Now they face the ultimate test, the encounter on which not only their present, but their future depends. Horses takes into the wide open spaces of the countryside. Here, two brothers, both given horses by their father, confront each other sensing that two different destinies are opening up for them. The Monkey, is about the fragility of identity, the desire to escape it and disappear. When Nico discovers that his boyhood friend Pietro has made the sudden, shocking decision to become a monkey, he is led to question the basis on which he has lived his own life. In Fists, Pietro Grossi has written three epics of the everyday, in which his characters, bound together by fate, struggle to find a meaning in human existence.
Novels in Three Lines (New York Review Books Classics)
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department.
Pinocchio (New York Review Books)
Though one of the best-known books in the world, Pinocchio at the same time remains unknown-linked in many minds to the Walt Disney movie that bears little relation to Carlo Collodi's splendid original. Yet it is hardly a sentimental or morally improving tale. To the contrary, Pinocchio is one of the great subversives of the written page, a madcap genius hurtled along at the pleasure and mercy of his desires, a renegade who in many ways resembles his near contemporary Huck Finn. Pinocchio the novel, no less than Pinocchio the character, is one of the great inventions of modern literature. The book merges the traditions of the picaresque, of street theater, and of folk and fairy tales into a work that is at once adventure, satire, and a powerful enchantment. Thronged with memorable characters and composed with the fluid but inevitable logic of a dream, Pinocchio is an endlessly fascinating work that is essential equipment for life.
The Following Story (Harvill Panther)
Socrates is a former classics teacher at a lycee. Dr Strabon is a travel writer and Mussert is a misanthrope, but also the man behind the masks of these other incongruous alter egos. In this novel, Nooteboom illustrates the polarities and similarities of scientific reality and philosophical theory.
Season of Migration to the North (Penguin Modern Classics)
'SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH-An Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy moral about international misconceptions and delusions. The brilliant student of an earlier generation returns to his Sudanese village; obsession with the mysterious West and a desire to bite the hand that has half-fed him, has led him to London and the beds of women with similar obsessions about the mysterious East. He kills them at the point of ecstasy and the Occident, in its turn, destroys him. Powerfully and poetically written and splendidly translated by Denys Johnson-Davies.' Observer
Beware of Pity
Reprinted with a new cover in B format for the fourth time due to popular demand, "Beware Of Pity" is a powerful novel which explores the complex hidden recesses of emotion. In 1913, a young second lieutenant discovers the terrible dangers of pity and eventually flees from them into the battlefield. His involvement begins with a faux pas: he had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance. Paying her an occasional afternoon call seemed to give him a new sense of purpose and he did not notice how imperceptibly bound up with tenderness his concern might be. The girl's face brightened, her father doted, the young man's self-esteem rose. But he was gradually to learn that pity, like morphia, is only a first solace to the invalid and unless one knows the exact dosage, and when to stop, it can become a virulent poison. "Beware of Pity" is Stefan Zweig's only novel and is a devastatingly sober realisation of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, set against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Kindly Ones
This Faustian story with a terrifying twist is the fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, who has reinvented himself as a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-war France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat, who speaks out now not in self-justification but to set the record straight. He looks back at his life with cool-eyed precision: from a disrupted childhood and a turning point in his student days, to his role as observer and then participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front, from Poland to the Caucasus; he is present at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps, and finally caught up in the rout of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin.Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures such as Eichmann, Himmler, Goring, Speer, Heydrich, Hoss, and Hitler himself. Massive in scope, terrifying in subject matter, and shocking in its protagonist, Littell's masterpiece is intense, hallucinatory, and terrifyingly compelling. Described by Le Figaro as 'a monument of contemporary literature', this transgressive work has been compared to classics of world literature, including War and Peace. A huge novel about the seductive enormity of evil, the ineffable horror of war, man's inhumanity and the malevolence of the Furies, this is a book that every thinking person should read and to which no one can be indifferent.
Journey by Moonlight (Pushkin paper)
Anxious to please his bourgeois father, Mihaly has joined the family firm in Budapest. Pursued by nostalgia for his bohemian youth, he seeks escape in marriage to Erzsi, not realising that she has chosen him as a means to her own rebellion. On their honeymoon in Italy, Mihaly 'loses' his bride at a provincial station and embarks on a chaotic and bizarre journey that leads him finally to Rome. There all the death-haunted and erotic elements of his past converge, and he, like Erzsi, has finally to make a choice.
The Fascination of Evil
When the narrator receives an invitation to visit Egypt as the guest of the French Embassy in Cairo, he anticipates a boring week of literary discussions and official dinners. He certainly does not foresee the extraordinary events that will ultimately lead to murder.From the start, his fellow author - Martin Millet - seems determined to stir up the tensions that underlie the politeness of Egyptian society. He offends Islamic sensibilities with his views on art and the novel, and worse: his entire stay degenerates into an obsessive search for an Egyptian woman willing to have sex with him. The atmosphere is one of mutual mistrust, bordering on open dislike, not just between East and West, but also between the two authors. As the narrator finds himself dragged ever deeper into Millet's obsessions, he begins not only to fear for his own and Millet's safety, but for the future of Western civilisation. When Millet disappears, he inevitably fears the worst...
The Hour of the Star (Black & White S.)
Clarice Lispector died of cancer at the age of fifty-six on 9th December 1977. "The Hour of the Star" was published that same year and acclaimed by the critics as 'a regional allegory' of extraordinary awareness and insight. Lispector herself defined "The Hour of the Star" as a book 'made without words...a mute photograph...a silence...a question'. The tale of Macabea can be read at different levels and lends itself to various interpretations. The book's subtle interplay of fiction and philosophy sums up Lispector's unique talent as a writer and her lasting influence on contemporary Brazilian writing.
In Features
- Grist for the Mill by Chris Womersley
- Stephen Kelman
- Samantha Harvey
- Courtney Sullivan
- Lucy Caldwell
- Padgett Powell
- Umberto Eco
- Prizing Asian Literature by David Parker
- Dag Solstad
- Ellen Feldman
In Fiction
- The Suicide Room by Adam Ross
- Management by Luiza Sauma
- In the Cave by Tessa Hadley
- All Fall Down by SJ Butler
- Professor Andersen by Dag Solstad
- Kate Minola by Marius Brill
- Two Ways of Leaving by Alois Hotschnig
- A Tender Meditation by Lucy Beresford
- SOME TIME AFTER BY CHARLOTTE BEESTON
- Jenna by Andrew Kaufman
Newsletter
Untitled Books
Your account
Register for an account and review books, comment on articles and build a list of your favourite reviews. Coming soon.
