Having spent some time in Rome, Antonio - the handsomest young man in Catania - returns to his native town with the reputation of being a playboy and with a long list of amorous adventures behind him.
From the reign of the Tsars in the early 19th century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture.
The most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature and our most extensive source of Norse mythologyWritten in Iceland a century after the close of the Viking Age, The Prose Edda tells ancient stories of the Norse creation epic and recounts the battles that follow as gods, giants, dwarves and elves struggle for survival.
Considered by Andr Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, mile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty of a mining community in northern France tienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper.
Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-five Sketches: the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia satisfying his passion for hunting.
'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the self-lacerating confession of a man consumed by sexual jealousy and eaten up by shame and eventually driven to murder his wife.
Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife.
In the final years of his life, Chekhov had reached the height of his powers as a dramatist, and also produced some of the stories that rank among his masterpieces.
Dostoyevsky's great novel of suffering and sickness, innocence and greedReturning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and na ve epileptic Prince Myshkin - the titular 'idiot' - pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General, his wife, and his three daughters.
'A masterpiece' Julian BarnesFlaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857.
'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm BradburyAlienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life.
'One of the greatest love stories in world literature' Vladimir NabokovThe heroine of Tolstoy's epic of love and self-destruction, Anna Karenina has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but feels that her life is empty until she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky.
Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'.
This rich and unforgettable story of sexual intrigue and political scheming, written by the Spanish feminist and intellectual Emilia Pardo Bazan, deserves recognition as one of the great nineteenth-century novels.
When the down-at-heel Princess Zasyekin moves next door to the country estate of Vladimir Petrovich's parents, he instantly and overwhelmingly falls in love with his new neighbour's daughter, Zinaida.
A superb new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening, strange and visionary short fictionAfter Franz Kafka's death, in perhaps the most important of all acts of literary disobedience, his executor refused to agree to Kafka's wish that his great mass of unpublished fiction be destroyed.
'I felt the powerful strength of my family overrunning me like a heavy rush of water'For Andr , a young man growing up on a farm in Brazil, life consists of 'the earth, the wheat, the bread, our table and our family'.
This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable works being written today.
'The father of contemporary European detective fiction' Ann Cleeves Maigret savoured the sensations of his youth again: the cold, stinging eyes, frozen fingertips, an aftertaste of coffee.
A charming, mind-bending and anarchic book of imagined civilizations'Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to.
A new translation and abridgement of one of the four classical Chinese novels - an epic story of warring factions in the era of China's Han dynastyPart historical and part legend, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms dramatizes the lives of feudal lords and their retainers, recounting their personal and military battles, intrigues, and struggles to achieve dominance for almost a hundred years.
A Heart so White is the breathtaking international bestseller and IMPAC Award-winning masterpiece by Javier Mar as, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013.
'It was a very momentous day, the day on which I was to be slaughtered' Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years.
While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was also writing a novelone equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself.
The Night Circus meets Lonely Castle in the Mirror in this multi-award-winning Japanese bestseller, available finally in an English translation by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami- AN FT BEST SUMMER READ 2023- OVER A MILLION COPIES SOLD IN JAPAN- WINNER OF THE NAOKI PRIZE AND THE JAPAN BOOKSELLERS' AWARD- A MAJOR MOVIE RELEASE IN JAPAN'A thrilling and often nail-biting depiction of music, friendship, and personal demons' OBSERVER'Propulsive and poetic' KIRKUS______________________Welcome to a magical world of music, friendship and rivalry .
A feminist pioneer, writer, and patron of the arts and literature in Buenos Aires, Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979) was a larger-than-life personality of legendary vitality.
Martha and the infamous League of Pensioners are back in The Little Old Lady Strikes Back, from the author of the smash-hit The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules.
