Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic figure among the world’s great authors, and The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.

A century after it first appeared, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most gripping psychological thrillers. A poverty-striken young man, seeing his family making sacrifices for him, is faced with an opportunity to solve his financial problems with one simple but horrifying act: the murder of a pawnbroker. She is, he feels, just a parasite on society. But does the end justify the means? Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov makes his decision and then has to live with it. Dostoyevsky, in mas...

Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin is one of the great characters in Russian literature. Is he a saint or just naïve? Is he an idealist or, as many in General Epanchin’s society feel, an ‘idiot’? Certainly his return to St Petersburg after years in a Swiss clinic has a dramatic effect on the beautiful Aglaia, youngest of the Epanchin daughters, and on the charismatic but wilful Nastasya Filippovna. As he paints a vivid picture of Russian society, Dostoyevsky shows how principles conflict wi...

Also known as Demons, The Possessed is a powerful socio-political novel about revolutionary ideas and the radicals behind them. It follows the career of Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky, a political terrorist who leads a group of Nihilists on a demonic quest for societal breakdown. They are consumed by their desires and ideals, and have surrendered themselves fully to the darkness of their ‘demons’. This possession leads them to engulf a quiet provincial town and subject it to a storm of vio...

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?This short no...

Tolstoy’s final work—a gripping novella about the struggle between the Muslim Chechens and their inept occupiers—is a powerful moral fable for our time.Inspired by a historical figure Tolstoy heard about while serving in the Caucasus, this story brings to life the famed warrior Hadji Murat, a Chechen rebel who has fought fiercely and courageously against the Russian empire. After a feud with his commander he defects to the Russians, only to find that he is now trusted by neither si...

A novel by the 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published serially in The Russian Messenger in 1868–69. The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young prince whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity, and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky set himself the task of depi...

Three friends, Mayer (a medical student), Rybnikov (a student of the arts), and Vassilyev (a law student), decide to go out one night to get some girls. Mayer and Rybnikov had to spend some time convincing Vassilyev to come along, as he was far more fastidious and cautious than his friends. Vassilyev himself is envious of his friends, who live their lives in a much more carefree fashion. The three friends visit several different houses containing the girls, but Vassilyev finds himself more...

The youngest daughter of a high-ranking samurai, Etsu was destined to become a priestess and was molded for that path by some of the best teachers. But her fate changed when she was married off to a businessman and sent across the world to America. Finding herself miles away from the life she had imagined, she had to learn all about a new world—and come to terms with how it was changing her beliefs about what she had been taught and what she still held dear from her upbringing in Japan. Th...

“True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.”Grab a pen and hone your writing skills under the guidance one of the greatest teachers of the craft.Edith Wharton made her claim in the literary world as the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. She is famous for her works of fiction, which include The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome. Breaking from this tradition, The Writing of Fiction sets itself apart as a distinct...

“In the spirit of Ágota Kristóf and Juan Rulfo, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine. A fecund and daring book.”—Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of XDawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, ...

A spectacular, voice-driven mystery from a highly acclaimed crime writer.How do you solve a murder when everyone thinks you're guilty?Marjorie Crowe lives in Kilgoyne, Scotland. The locals put her age at somewhere between 55 and 70. They think she's divorced or a lifelong spinster; that she used to be a librarian, a pharmacist, or a witch. They think she's lonely, or ill, or maybe just plain rude. For the most part, they leave her be.