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Henrik Pontoppidan

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland for Denmark's capital city. Per is a gifted young man who firmly believes that 'you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast ... and capture and bind it'. He falls in with Copenhagen's Jewish community, and falls for Jakobe Salomon, a wealthy heiress, who is not only the strongest character in the book but among the great Jewish heroines of European literature. 
 Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will both reshape Denmark's landscape and correct its minor position in the world. Eventually personal and his career ambitions alike come to grief. At the heart of Lucky Per lies the question of the relationship of 'luck' to 'happiness' (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship which Per comes to view differently by the end of his life.

Lucky Per

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoesky's drama of sin, guilt and redemption transmutes the sordid story of an old woman's murder by a desperate student into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Grim in theme and setting, the book nevertheless seduces by its combination of superbly drawn characters, narrative brilliance and manic comedy.

Crime And Punishment

Ivan Turgenev

This volume pairs two novels, one early, one late, by Ivan Turgenev, master chronicler of nineteenth-century Russia. 
 
Nest of the Gentry (1859) was his most popular work in his lifetime, and with good reason. An elegiac story of love and loss, it is both universal and particularly Russian. The hero Fyodor Lavretsky, son of a wealthy landowner and educated in the Western style, falls romantically in love with a woman he meets at the Moscow opera; they settle in Paris. When the marriage fails, he returns to Russia, a rootless cosmopolitan or ‘superfluous man’. Back on his country estate, can he make a new start, reconcile himself to his responsibilities to the land and the people, and achieve an almost spiritual fulfilment in his love for his young cousin Liza? 
 
In Virgin Soil (1877), an older Turgenev boldly tackles the new radical politics of his era. The Tsarist regime is increasingly under challenge. Young people are flocking to the countryside to live side by side with the peasants, both to learn from them and to radicalise them. Poet Alexey Nezhdanov is an unlikely revolutionary, an over-thinking Hamlet figure, and a tragedy waiting to happen. While working as a tutor on a country estate, he is attracted to the self-assured and politically committed Marianna – an ardent idealist determined to sacrifice herself for the revolutionary cause. Turgenev, himself a liberal, deals sympathetically with his characters, respecting the seriousness of purpose of this new generation whose methods he could not endorse. Virgin Soil turned Turgenev into an international figure, and explicator of the perplexing Russian political scene (in its year of publication hundreds of young Populists were brought to trial, many receiving heavy sentences); in Russia it was roundly condemned on all sides. 
 
Turgenev was a supreme artist; in both these novels his profound humanity, his love for nature and for the Russian countryside, shine through the lyrical elegance of his prose.

Nest of the Gentry & Virgin Soil

Vasily Grossman

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal - an unexpected and short-lived moment of freedom. Grossman himself was on the front line as a war correspondent at Stalingrad - hence his gripping battle scenes, though these are more than matched by the drama of the individual conscience struggling against massive pressure to submit to the State. He knew all about this from experience too. His central character, Viktor Shtrum, eventually succumbs, but each delay and act of resistance is a moral victory. Though he writes unsparingly of war, terror and totalitarianism, Grossman also tells of the acts of 'senseless kindness' that redeem humanity, and his message remains one of hope. He dedicates his book, the labour of ten years, and which he did not live to see published, to his mother, who, like Viktor Shtrum's, was killed in the holocaust at Berdichev in Ukraine in September 1941.

Life and Fate

Nikolai Gogol

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humour, and delight in human oddity and error.

Dead Souls

Italo Svevo

The modern Italian classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is a marvel of psychological insight, published here in a fine new translation by William Weaver - the first in more than seventy years. 
 
Italo Svevo's masterpiece tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man paralyzed by fits of ecstasy and despair and tickled by his own cleverness. His doctor advises him, as a form of therapy, to write his memoirs; in doing so, Zeno reconstructs and ultimately reshapes the events of his life into a palatable reality for himself - a reality, however, founded on compromise, delusion, and rationalization. 
With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed "last cigarette!" (Zeno's famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) 
 
His amorous wanderings win him the shrill affections of an aspiring coloratura, and his confidence in his financial savoir-faire involves him in a hopeless speculative enterprise. Meanwhile, his trusting wife reliably awaits his return at appointed mealtimes. Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to he joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century.

Zeno's Conscience

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking conditions, brutal punishments, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom and hope; it describes the daily life of the prison community, the feuds and betrayals, the moments of comedy, the unexpected acts of kindness. 
To avoid censorship, Dostoevsky made his protagonist a common criminal, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. As a member of the nobility he had been despised by his fellow prisoners, most of whom were peasants - an experience shared in the book by Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman who has killed his wife. Like his creator, Goryanchikov undergoes a transformation over the course of his ordeal, as he discovers 'deep, strong, beautiful natures' amongst even the roughest of the convicts. Notes from a Dead House shows the prison camp as a tragedy for the inmates and a tragedy for Russia. It endures today as a profound meditation on freedom.

Notes from a Dead House

Leo Tolstoy

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life. Volume 2 reveals how these spiritual intimations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces which equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power. Readers of The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, Master and Man and Hadji Murad will recognize the brilliant younger novelist, now transfigured by his passionate quest for salvation and forgiveness.

Collected Shorter Fiction Boxed Set (2 Volumes)

A nobleman faces the consequences of his youthful wrongdoing when the girl he seduced and abandoned some years earlier is put on trial in a murder case. Initially conceived as a love story, Tolstoy’s last novel, published in 1899, is a dark masterpiece in which the whole of Imperial Russian society is tried and found wanting. Resurrection moves from the salons and country estates of the aristocracy to courtrooms and government offices, brothels and prisons; from Moscow and St Petersburg by road, rail and route march to the penal settlements of Siberia. Its pages are peopled with convicts and gaolers, revolutionaries and religious sectaries, soldiers, labourers and lawyers, peasants, priests and prostitutes. While for Prince Nekhlyudov and Katusha Maslova salvation through love proves problematic, the journey into exile becomes one of self-discovery and spiritual transformation.

Resurrection

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

The struggle for power between two magnetic personalities, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte to Valmont, is charted through a series of brilliant letters whose shimmering surface reveals all the more clearly the cynical amorality of their authors. These former lovers manipulate innocent victims into their elaborate schemes of seduction and revenge – the teenage Cécile, just out of her convent, her sweetheart the Chevalier Danceny, Madame de Tourvel, a virtuous married woman – with appalling success until events and feelings spiral out of control, and the main protagonists turn fatally upon each other. 
Over the years Dangerous Liaisons has gathered devotees as disparate as Marie Antoinette, Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf. It has inspired plays, films, ballets, operas and TV series, but it is the original novel that best demonstrates Laclos’ unique combination of comedy and tragedy, sentiment and brutality, farce and horror; and Laclos’ own subtle prose that conveys both psychological insight and an erotic tenderness as essential to the story as the verbal fireworks.

Dangerous Liaisons

Jaroslav Hašek

An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determination to survive brings into question the mighty social and political institutions he confronts. Set in a Central Europe which has long since vanished, Hasek's novel is nevertheless a timeless portrait of the 'little man' doughtily waging his own war against authority

The Good Soldier Svejk

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers.Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a “novel-pamphlet” in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia–a novel that is rivaled only by The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky’s greatest. 
 
The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as The Possessed.

Demons

Tolstoy’s lightly fictionalized account of his own early experience ranks with Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook as a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Russian pastoral life. Peasants and soldiers, servants and aristocrats: the whole world of Tolstoy’s later fiction appears before us here in glowing colours, painted with that vivid freshness and sharp observation which were to become the mature writer’s hallmarks.

Childhood, Boyhood And Youth

Mikhail Bulgakov

Kiev - Kyiv - is in chaos. Russia has withdrawn from World War I but the Germans have set up a puppet government in Ukraine. Civil war rages: the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, but the anti-revolutionary White Guard who have fled to Ukraine, are rallying to resist. In the meantime, Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital, and a Red army is on its way to bring everyone to heel. While all this is going on, the Turbin family try to eke out their existence in Kyiv and discuss what they should do. They are exactly the sort of family - monarchist intelligentsia - for whom the future looks particularly menacing. 
Bulgakov's brilliant and evocative prose brings the city and the moment unforgettably to life and sheds some fascinating light on the complex interwoven histories of Ukraine and Russia.

The White Guard

Junichiro Tanizaki

Hailed as the greatest Japanese novel of the Twentieth century, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS is a subtle tale of domestic oppression worthy of Balzac or Chekhov, In this saga of the once prosperous but now declining Makioka family struggling to marry off one of their daughters, Tanizaki presents the picture of a family and a society striving to preserve their self-respect as they come to terms with disturbing new ways in a classic confrontation of innovasion and tradition. A wonderful portrait of Japanese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Makioka Sisters

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - stories which combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way of Dostoevsky and Kakfa. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of satire and realism that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.

Gogol Collected Tales

Guy de Maupassant

During his most productive decade, the 1880s, Maupassant wrote more than 300 stories, including 'Boule de Suif', 'The Necklace', 'The House of Madame Tellier', 'The Hand', 'The Horla' and 'Mademoiselle Fifi'. Marked by the psychological realism that he famously pioneered, the tales in this selection lead us on a tour of the human experience-lust and love, revenge and ridicule, terror and madness. Many take place in the author's native Normandy, but the settings range farther abroad as well, from Brittany and Paris to Corsica and the Mediterranean coast, and even to North Africa and India. Maupassant's remarkable range and ability to evoke an entire world in a few pages have ensured that his fiction has retained its power to entertain through generations of readers. Marjorie Laurie's accomplished translations from the 1920s have similarly stood the test of time.

Selected Stories

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life.

Collected Shorter Fiction Volume 1

Alexander Pushkin

The archetypal Romantic, killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37, Alexander Pushkin was effectively the founder of modern Russian literature. Though famous as a poet, he was equally at home in prose, and this volume includes all his short fiction, as well as unfinished sketches and fragments. Here of course are his masterpieces, 'The Queen of Spades', Pushkin's ironic take on both the supernatural and the society tale, the terse, deadpan Tales of Belkin, often humorous yet imbued with deep understanding of human nature, and his unsurpassable novella, The Captain's Daughter, which, informed by his meticulous research into the Pugachev Rebellion against Catherine the Great, is a perfect combination of folk epic, historical narrative and romance. Other works include the richly comic 'A History of the Village of Goriukhino', the imaginative historical fiction 'The Moor of Peter the Great' (based on the life of the author's own great-grandfather. Pushkin was particularly proud of his African ancestry), and 'Journey to Arzrum', the fascinating autobiographical account of his (unauthorized, and greatly displeasing to the Tsar) travels in the Caucasus at the time of the 1828-9 Russo-Turkish war.

Novels, Tales, Journeys

Yukio Mishima

Generally regarded both in Japan and in the West as his most successful novel, THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION brings together all Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religious life and the history of his own nation. Based on actual incident, the burning of a celebrated temple, the novel is both a vivid narrative and a meditation on the state of Japan in the post-war period.

The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion

Ivo Andric

The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed--until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates a succession of lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches. Among them is that of the bridge's builder, a Serb kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans; years later, as the empire's Grand Vezir, he decides to construct a bridge at the spot where he was parted from his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder the construction, with horrific consequences. Later, the beautiful young Fata climbs the bridge's parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and, later still, an inveterate gambler named Milan risks everything on it in one final game with the devil. With humor and compassion, Ivo Andric chronicles the ordinary Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries.

The Bridge on the Drina

Ovid

One of the founding texts of Western literature, the Metamorphoses is nevertheless anything but earnest or off-putting. Ovid’s sequence of fifteen witty and playful poems sketches the history of the world from its creation to the poet’s own time through a series of transformation myths in which gods and goddesses succumb to all-too-human passions, not least in the matter of love. Frequently translated, imitated and paraphrased.

The Metamorphoses

Franz Kafka

Kafka was an obsessive writer who produced a huge volume of stories, novels, diaries and letters in his brief lifetime. The present volume includes all his available shorter fiction in a new collection edited and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici. The stories, which range from tiny fragments to substantial narratives, have been arranged both to illuminate one another and to illustrate Kafka's evolution as a writer - which, as Professor Josipovici shows, is more complex and radical than often thought. The extensive prefatory essay is an introduction not only to the stories but also to Kafka's work as a whole.

Collected Stories

Mahmoud Darwish

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

In this sumptuous, expansive new collection -- featuring new translations, for the first time, into English of significant poems from the 1960s to 1980s – Mahmoud Darwish's full scope as a poet, Palestinian, political asylee, and renderer of worlds is finally on full display. 
Darwish was a master of Arab poetics and modernist methods, and in combining these influences, he created poetry of intense beauty and resonant music and is forever read and treasured around the Middle East as a source of comfort and pride. 
 
Never before has literature related to Palestine been so in demand, as showcased by the commercial success of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad and Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha. Readers are clearly seeking nonfiction and fiction alike to better understand the history of the region and its people.

Darwish

Poems

Still little known in the West, Persian poetry offers extraordinary riches. While celebrating the beauty of the world in poems about love, wine and poetry itself, or telling anecdotes of everyday life, Persian poetry set these themes in the wider religious and philosophical context of Islam. Omar, Rumi, Saadi, Sanai, Attar, Hafez and Jami – the great lyric and didactic poets of medieval Persia – are all represented in this selection of translations spanning almost two hundred and fifty years.

Persian Poems

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