Because Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago. Gathered here in superb new renderings by one of the most highly regarded translators of our time—versions that have been staged throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain—are Chekhov’s four essential masterpieces for the theater.

The Book of Blam, Aleksandar Tišma’s “extended kaddish . . . [his] masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews), is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. A...

The Czech Avant-Garde Literary Movement Between the Two World Wars tells the little-known story of the renaissance of Czech literary arts in the period between the two world wars. The avant-garde writers during this period broke down the barrier between the elite literary language and the vernacular and turned to spoken language, substandard forms, everyday sources such as newspapers and detective stories, and forms of popular entertainment such as the circus and the cabaret. In h...

**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 ...

Russia, 1861Antonina's world is shattered one cold spring afternoon, when her only son, Misha, is kidnapped while out riding with his father, the Count of the Angelkov estate. The Count is also terribly injured, and Antonina turns for help to those closest to her: Grisha, the estate steward, a man whose stoic exterior hides a secret shame he has borne all the way from Siberia, where he was born; and Lilya, the maid who jealously guards her mistress's secrets - - and her af...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The "stunning" debut novel (Los Angeles Times)from the bestselling author of The Flight Portfolio—the inspiration for the Netflix series Transatlantic—is a grand love story set against the backdrop of Budapest and Paris, a tale of three brothers whose lives are ravaged by war, and of one family’s struggle against the forces that threaten to annihilate it.Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architect...

A Granta Best Young American Novelist1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, where we meet a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director...

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...

Stories exploring a world of ordinary people caught between the pincers of aggressors, leading to actions at once deplorable, perplexing, and heroic.In the fall of 1944, the Red Army encircled Budapest, surrounding tens of thousands of German and Hungarian troops, and nearly a million civilians. The ensuing months witnessed one of the most brutal sieges of World War II, with block-to-block guerilla warfare followed by widespread disease, starvation, and unspeakable ...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREStarring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, & James McAvoyIn 1910, Count Leo Tolstoy, the most famous writer in the world, is caught in the struggle between his devoted wife and an equally devoted acolyte over the master's legacy. Sofya Andreyevna fears that she and the children she has borne Tolstoy will lose all to Vladimir Chertkov and the Tolstoyan movement, which preaches the ideals of poverty, chastity, and pacifism.As...

**‘Prose this powerful could wake the dead’ – ObserverCrossing a century of Eastern European history, The Lazarus Project is a profound exploration of alienation and the immigrant experience from Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds.**On 2 March 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the city’s Chief of Police. He was shot dead.After the shooting, it was clai...

One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of 2011“Vladimir Sorokin is one of Russia's greatest writers, and this novel is one of his best . . . A joy to read—more entertaining, dynamic, engaging, and deeply hilarious than a dystopian novel has any right to be.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love StoryA startling, relentless portrait of a troubled and troubling Russian empire, V...