This is a translation from a Russian work published in 1958, one of the major works of a well-known and prolific writer. It deals with the origins of the small nations and peoples of central Siberia and northeastern Asia. Many guesses have been made about these peoples but most have not been substantiated, because of the lack of field work or because the materials on them had not been analysed and published. Levin has reviewed the old materials, gathered and analysed hitherto unpublished o...

HEAL YOUR DEPRESSION AND REGAIN YOUR LIFE—WITH THREE NEW TOOLS ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF TREATMENTEveryone feels depressed sometimes. But a sustained lack of energy, a pro-found inability to enjoy life, or an overwhelming sadness that can render unbearable pain may be symptoms of something more. If you suffer from any of these symptoms, you may be one of 300 million people worldwide who have depression. While we often think of pharmaceutical treatments as the best way...

How has American literature after postmodernism responded to the digital age? Drawing on insights from contemporary media theory, this is the first book to explore the explosion of new media technologies as an animating context for contemporary American literature. Casey Michael Henry examines the intertwining histories of new media forms since the 1970s and literary postmodernism and its aftermath, from William Gaddis's J R and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho through...

Often called “the Kafka of Romania,” Max Blecher died young but not before creating this incandescent novel.Adventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, vividly paints the crises of "irreality" that plagued him in his youth: eerie and unsettling mirages wherein he would glimpse future events. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novel sketches the tremulous, fright...

On 20 March 1775, The Second Virginia Convention convened at St. John's Church in Richmond. They assembled to consider weighty matters concerning the tyranny and oppression of the Crown. Many favored continued conciliatory measures. A thirty-nine year old delegate from Hanover County named Pätrick Henry took a seat in the third pew. Here sat a man with a burden. He knew he faced "an irresolute body; that he would be opposed by the powerful, wealthy, Tory element among the members. He reali...

Never have two such important world figures collaborated in a biography: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), the original Philosopher-President who founded Czechoslovakia in 1918, and Karel Čapek (1890-1938), the leading Czech writer of the time. Čapek interviewed Masaryk over a number of years and produced a single narrative that tells Masaryk's incredible story in a voice as ordinary yet magical as the best of Čapek's fictional characters. The result is a biographical work like no other,...

Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life—or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventure...

From the author of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and Thank You for Not ReadingFrom the story of Steffie Cvek to "The Kharms Case," the pieces in Dubravka Ugresic's collection Lend Me Your Character are always smart and endlessly entertaining. The former story paints a picture of a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by cliches. She searches endlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare adv...

Nearly a century after it was first published in 1925, Medieval Cities remains one of the most provocative works of medieval history ever written. Here, Henri Pirenne argues that it was not the invasion of the Germanic tribes that destroyed the civilization of antiquity, but rather the closing of Mediterranean trade by Arab conquest in the seventh century. The consequent interruption of long-distance commerce accelerated the decline of the ancient cities of Europe. Pirenne challen...

Following the death of her father, Isabel Archer leaves the comforts of Albany, New York to stay with her aunt Lydia Touchett at her London estate. There she meets Lydia's rich husband, David, her cousin Ralph, and the Touchetts's proud neighbor, Lord Warburton. Soon, too, come marriage proposals from Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, the son of a wealthy mill owner. Although Isabel declines both offers, she eventually gives her hand to Gilbert Osmond, an American ex-pat in Florence.

Matter and Memory, (Matière et Mémoire), published in 1896, was the second book written by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), one of the leading French philosophers of his age. It followed Time and Free Will (1889) and helped to establish him as a major force in anti-mechanistic thought, opposing the trend towards uncompromisingly secular and scientific views. However, when Matter and Memory appeared, Bergson was 39 and had yet to become the hugely influential figure he became in the first decades...

Catherine Sloper is a plain girl, and the only child of a successful New York Doctor. Quite unprepared for the attentions of a handsome suitor like Morris Townsend. But when a beautiful man courts the affection of a plain girl with a handsome private fortune what is anyone to think? Certainly her father knows what Morris Townsend is about... but between Townsends greed and indolence, her aunts pathological desire to meddle and a fathers sarcasm, whatever will become of the poor girl in the...