Tolstoy produced many drafts of "Anna Karenina". Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, his use of language was anything but casual. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instru...

Lewis Carroll's novels "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and "Through the Looking Glass" (first published in 1865 and 1871, respectively) have entertained readers young and old for more than a century. Their magical worlds, amusing characters, cleve...

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal's work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal's own experiences. "Against Nature", a companion volume to Espedal's earlier "Against Art", is an examina...

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who sh...

Written from a vantage point both high and deliberately narrow, the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell nevertheless deal in the universal themes that would become a substantial part of his oeuvre: pride, greed, and the strange dri...

On April 8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than two hundred bombers was diverted to near...

Unsavory artists, titled boobs, and charlatans with an affinity for Freud – such are the oddballs whose antics animate the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell. A genius of social satire delivered with a very dry wit, Powell builds...

The world as we know it is over. Man's reign on earth has come to an end, and the reign of the animals has begun. The indifferently wise Cyrus Golden the Lion rules the three-city state that is now what remains of Europe. Yet, other forces stir while...

As legend has it, the storyteller Aesop was a slave who lived in ancient Greece during the sixth century B.C. His memorable, recountable fables have brought amusing characters to life and driven home thought-provoking morals for generations of listen...

Not for sale in Estonia! One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the "infraordinary": the humdrum, the non-event, the everyday – "what happens", as he put it, "when nothing happens". His choice of locale was Place Sa...