Two conjoined babies are born at the intersection of two social worldviews. The girls are named Faith and Hope. After spending their childhood in a foster home and obtaining a basic education, they come to realise that they are different from other people in many respects. The problems of their upbringing are only made worse by the constant humiliations they suffer at the hands of society.Eventually, fortune smiles on them, by seemingly opening up the door to happiness: a separatio...

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s best tales from the major periods of his creative life.Considered the greatest short story writer, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressi...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “riveting” (The Wall Street Journal) and “wonderfully entertaining” (The Boston Globe) account of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life, told through the experiences of the four women who loved him.“Boyle handles the big themes—Wright the genius battling an uncomprehending, philistine world and Wright the man loving and loathing his women—with extraordinary brio.”—San Francisco Chronicle...

In this powerful, unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Darin Strauss examines the far-reaching consequences of the tragic moment that has shadowed his whole life. In his last month of high school, he was behind the wheel of his dad's Oldsmobile, driving with friends, heading off to play mini-golf. Then: a classmate swerved in front of his car. The collision resulted in her death. With piercing insight and stark prose, Darin Strauss leads us on a deeply personal, immediate, and emotiona...

Two terrifying classics by “the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction” (The Washington Post)Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepes...

A moving, utterly captivating love story: Romeo and Juliet as if told by Chekhov or Dostoevsky. In a remote Russian village a woman waits, as she has waited for almost three decades, for the man she loves to return. Near the end of World War II, nineteen-year-old Boris Koptek left the village to join the Russian army, swearing to the sixteen-year-old love of his life, Vera, that as soon as he returned they would marry. Young Boris, who with his engineering battalion fought his way almost t...

From the Nobel Prize–winning author: "One of the great short novels of the 20th century" ( The Wall Street Journal).Internationally acclaimed as one of the world's most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this "deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror" ( The Japan Times).Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging ...

Censored in France in 1954, Therese and Isabelle was published for the first time in its full original version in 2000. Leduc's novella follows the story of a passionate love affair between two schoolgirls, aiming to describe 'as exactly, as minutely as possible the sensations of physical love'.

Of all my memories, of all my life's innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.'A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago - from the victim's point of view. It's a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man. So begins the strange quest for the elusive writer 'Alexander Wolf'. A singular classic, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is a psychological thr...

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 ...

Set in Saint Petersburg during the Revolution of 1905, this classic of Russian literature draws comparisons to James Joyce’s Ulysses for its display of symbolism and humorAfter enlisting in a revolutionary terrorist organization, the university student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is entrusted with a highly dangerous mission: to plant a bomb and assassinate a major government figure.But the real central character of Petersburg is the Rus...

The wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder. • “A beautiful mystery plot, not to be revealed.” – Newsweek“Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” – John Updike“One of Mr. Nabokov’s finest, most challenging and provocative novels.” – The New York TimesDespair’s protagonist, Hermann, is another mast...