European classics

A young woman in 1880s Italy is forbidden to marry a dashing young man because he has no money. Teresa Caccia is put to work by her father, looking after her younger siblings, and only when they grow up is she able to join her love.

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.

Experiences of the author while serving as Italian liason officer with the 5th Army.

"In this classic of Russian humor and social commentary, a fired cable fitter goes on a binge and hopes a train to Petushki (where his "most beloved of trollops" awaits). On the way he bestows upon angels, fellow passengers, and the world at large a magnificent monologue on alcohol, politics, society, alcohol, philosophy, the pains of love, and, of course, alcohol."--Amazon.com.

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.

Five women of different backgrounds move into an apartment in Moscow during World War II. The novel chronicles the tensions resulting from differences in intellect, culture, class, not to mention lack of space and a shortages of the basic necessities of life. The author is a Russian mathematician.

"Ostap Bender is an unemployed con artist living by his wits in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia. He joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to find a cache of missing jewels which were hidden in some chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the bejeweled chairs takes these unlikely heroes from the provinces to Moscow to the wilds of Soviet Georgia and the Trans-caucasus mountains; on their quest they encounter a wide variety of characters: from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the prerevolutionary propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and ineffective than the one before."--BOOK JACKET.

Giovanna and Costantino Ledda are a happily married young Sardinian couple living a contented village existence with their small child and extended family. But after Costantino is wrongly convicted of murdering his uncle and imprisoned, the now‐impoverished Giovanna reluctantly divorces him under a newly enacted divorce law and marries Brontu Dejas, a wealthy but cruel drunkard who has always coveted her. While enduring a slave’s existence within this new marriage as well as the community’s derision of her as the “wife with two husbands,” the broken Giovanna is unexpectedly reunited with an embittered Costantino after his exoneration and early release from prison, and the two resume their now‐illicit relationship. An exploration of hypocrisy, expiation, and the human disruption of a supernatural order that remorselessly reasserts itself, After the Divorce is set in an insular society of ancient, religious roots grappling with the intrusion of modern, secular social mores and is among the earliest of the serious works on which Grazia Deledda’s literary reputation is based. Deledda—the first Italian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—critiqued the social norms of her native Sardinia through verismo depictions of the struggles of the lower classes, into which she wove elements of her own personal tragedies.