The first English-language collection of short stories by Russia's greatest contemporary author, Mikhail Shishkin, the only author to win all three of Russia's most prestigious literary awards.Often included in discussions of Nobel Prize contenders, Shishkin is a master prose writer in the breathtakingly beautiful style of the greatest Russian authors, known for complex, allusive novels about universal and emotional themes. Shishkin's stories read like modern versions of the eterna...

Sergei Dovlatov's subtle, dark–edged humor and wry observations are in full force in The Suitcase as he examines eight objects—the items he brought with him in his luggage upon his emigration from the U.S.S.R. These seemingly undistinguished possessions, stuffed into a worn–out suitcase, take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them, occasioning a brilliant series of interconnected tales: A poplin shirt evokes th...

A remarkable memoir of living in the Soviet Union and working as a literary translator.In the early twentieth century, Lilianna Lungina was a Russian Jew born to privilege, spending her childhood in Germany, France, and Palestine. But when she was thirteen, her parents moved to the USSR—where Lungina became witness to many of the era's greatest upheavals.Exiled during World War II, dragged to KGB headquarters to report on her friends, and subjected to her n...

**Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for AutobiographyThe prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia**Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were ...

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, ...

Powerful, off-beat stories about women living in the shadow of the now-frozen, now-thawing war in UkraineOut of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets’s captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encount...

Running from her father’s brutal legacy, Joseph Stalin’s daughter defects to the United States during the turbulence of the 1960s. For fans of We Were the Lucky Ones and A Gentleman in Moscow, this sweeping historical novel and unexpected love story is inspired by the remarkable life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.“The Red Daughter does exactly what good historical fiction should do: It sends you down the rabbit hole to read and learn mor...

Clarence Brown's marvelous collection introduces readers to the most resonant voices of twentieth-century Russia.It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy

As war crimes prosecutions seize Australia, Fiona Kovalenko discovers that her own family is implicated in the darkest events of the twentieth century. This is their story.First published under an assumed identity, The Hand that Signed the Paper remains one of the most celebrated and controversial books in recent Australian literature. With a new introduction by the author, it continues to raise urgent questions about history, responsibility, and truth.“Astonishing...

"Fascinating from the first page to the last . . . A rich and absorbing memoir . . . To be Stalin's daughter and to remain human is itself admirable." — The New York Times Book ReviewIn this riveting, New York Times–bestselling memoir—first published by Harper in 1967—Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, subject of Rosemary Sullivan's critically acclaimed biography, Stalin's Daughter, describes the surreal experience of growing up in the Kremlin...

Though she is the daughter of a princess, Mariana was raised as a peasant and decides not to take up aristocratic life. Trained as a nurse, she goes to the front lines instead where she's confronted with the realities of war--and encounters a man who once betrayed her. Can Mariana learn to trust him now? And will she and her family survive a dangerous new threat?

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…Set in 1928 but written four years earlier, during Stalin’s rise to power, The Fatal Eggs is both an early p...