A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at the forefront of the Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. In the title story, for example, a family's tour of fashionable Eur...

Maxim Gorky achieved literary acclaim in Russia against all odds. Orphaned at a young age and forced to fend for himself on the streets, Gorky had virtually no schooling, but he managed to capture the imaginations of readers through his intensely realistic descriptions of the hardships faced by the impoverished and marginalized. From the very beginning of his career, Gorky maintained a correspondence with Russian literary luminary Anton Chekhov, which later blossomed into a lasting friends...

The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov.In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov's teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduat...

The Nobel Prize–winning author's masterful novella of eros and obsession, presented alongside other short works of lyrical beauty and psychological depth.In Thomas Mann's immortal novella A Death in Venice, renowned author Gustave Aschenbach faces both middle age and a severe case of writer's block. He resolves to go on holiday in search of inspiration, only to find himself awestruck by the classical beauty of a fourteen-year-old boy. Submitting to his obs...

Leo Tolstoy’s harrowing tale about a man battling a mysterious illness who must confront his impending death, the pitfalls of redemption, and the meaning of life itself.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 death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, a...

D.H. Lawrence was an English author in the early 20th century. Lawrence’s books were considered controversial at the time they were written and many were banned. Because of the censorship, Lawrence’s books became more popular as time passed. This edition of Sea and Sardinia includes a table of contents.

A forty-year-old man named Dmitri Gurov is intrigued by a young woman walking along the sea front of Yalta with her small Pomeranian dog…   Anton Chekov’s 1899 story The Lady with the Dog tells of an adulterous affair between a Russian banker and a young lady he meets while vacationing in Yalta. The story comprises four parts: part I describes the initial meeting in Yalta, part II the consummation of the affair and the remaining time in Yalta, p...

The amiable detective-priest Father Brown, who brought Chesterton to a wider public first appeared in The Innocence of Father Brown and remains one of the best-known names in crime fiction.These two novels were first published in 1911 and 1914 and contain 12 short stories each.

Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903), American Lithographer and Watercolorist spent much of his time in Europe, but visited Japan in 1890 and spent three years there.

The combination of decadence,the macabre and the demonic, with depraved female heroines made Boito's stories an immediate and popular success in fin de siecle Italy.Today Boito is seen as one of the major Italian authors of his period and the master of the novella form. Outside Italy lLuchino Visconti's film of Senso, which brilliantly captured the ambience and atmosphere of the novella, created a world-wide audience for Boito's work.

An enthralling novelette by Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers explores how a thirteen-year-old girl ceases to be a child and becomes a woman in Russia just before the Communist Revolution. The story examines the world through the reminiscences of a young girl and explores such themes as nature and how we are able to shape the world around us by how we perceive it. The novelette gives readers a prime example of Pasternak's signatu...

The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from rosy Italy to their own Germany.