"Five Spice Street" is a novel about a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Som...

A timeless story of love, morality, and tragedy, Fernando de Rojas's "Celestina" is a classic of Spanish literature. Second only to "Don Quixote" in its cultural importance, Rojas' dramatic dialogue presents the elaborate tale of a star-crossed court...

In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, the four novellas of "Compulsory Happiness" create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of t...

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on "moral grounds", is investigating his father's death...

"Alphabets and names make games and everybody has a name and all the same they have in a way to have a birthday" muses Gertrude Stein in "To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays". Written in 1940 and intended as a follow-up to her children's book "T...

Picking up where Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives left off, "The Deadly Dinner Party" presents fifteen edge-of-your-seat, real-life medical detective stories written by a practicing physician. Award-winning author Jonathan Edlow shows the doct...

One hundred years after his death, Tolstoy still inspires controversy with his notoriously complex narrative strategies. This book explores how and why Tolstoy has mystified interpreters and offers a look at his most famous works of fiction.

Set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when idleness was still looked upon by Russia's serf-owning rural gentry as a plausible and worthy goal, Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" follows the travails of an unlikely hero, a young aristocrat incapable...

"White Guard", Mikhail Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical first novel, revolves around a Russian family in their home city of Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin, adult siblings who have just lost their mother, find themselves plunged into...

Treacherous, power-hungry, untempered by moral restraint, and embittered by physical deformity, Richard, the younger brother of King Edward IV, is ablaze with ambition to take England's throne. Richard III, Shakespeare's long chronicle of Richard's m...