European classics

"After serving time in mainland Italy for a minor theft, Elias Portolu returns home to Nuoro, in rural Sardinia. Lonely and vulnerable after his prison exile, he falls in love with Maddalena, his brother's fiancee. He finds himself trapped by social and religious strictures, his passion and guilt winding into a spiral of anguish and paralyzing indecision. For guidance he turns to the village priest, who advises him to resist temptation; then he turns to the pagan "father of the woods," who recognizes the weakness of human will and urges him to declare his love before it is too late. Finally Elias chooses a course that provides a measure of redemption but forces him into a position from which he can only helphlessly observe the results of his affair."--Back cover.

This is the first English-language collection of stories by the nineteenth-century writer Boleslaw Prus, who has been called the greatest Polish novelist of all time. While some of his major novels have been translated into English, there has been no definitive collection of his short fiction until now. This new work, containing twelve of Prus's classic shorter pieces, explores the full range of his talent - the depth of thought, human warmth, accuracy of observation, and technical excellence for which he has been justly praised. The stories range in tone from the whimsical ("Stas's Little Adventure") to the tragic ("The Waistcoat"), and are peopled with intriguing characters in settings from nineteenth-century Warsaw to Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs. Even the natural world doesn't escape Prus's eye for detail: the lives of humans are as influenced by the growth patterns of fungi as by the bite of a deadly spider. Prus's deep compassion for the human condition and his profound understanding of human joy and suffering run throughout this collection. In all the stories, the tightness of construction is matched by a deceptive simplicity of language. Prus's vocabulary is chosen with immense care, though it flows with a rare naturalness. He is sentimental without being maudlin, comic without being cruel, and metaphysical without being pretentious. It is not without reason that he is known as one of the greatest stylists Poland has produced.

End of a Mission, written in 1968, finds Heinrich Boll trying to come to terms with his country's past in an investigation of an inexplicable crime and an even more absurd trial. Told to rack up mileage on a jeep to prepare it for inspection, a soldier drives it home--and burns it in the company of his father. Boll's account of the testimony and background of the witnesses, and their nonplussed response to the composure and satisfaction of the accused, illuminates the life of an insignificant town caught up in sudden, unreasonable importance.

A Russian novel which looks at childhood. For its three-year-old narrator life becomes progressively more boring the older he grows, routine killing his spontaneity. A revised version of an earlier translation.

At the center of a terrorized society buttressed by oppressive police protection and surveillance is the Tolm family, Fritz, the father, the elected head of the Association, and the children, part of the counter-culture.

A struggling couple living in poverty seperate only to find that their newfound seperation does not bring them happiness.

A 1930s novel on a disillusioned Russian Communist. He analyzes the manner in which people rationalize their membership in the Communist party, turning a blind eye to its excesses.