Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Ladislav Fuks (1923-1994) was an outstanding Czech writer whose work, consisting primarily of psychological fiction, explores themes of anxiety and life in totalitarian systems. Fuks is be...

This spare, unforgettable novel is Pierre Michon's luminous exploration of the mysteries of desire. A young teacher takes his first job in a sleepy French town. Lost in a succession of rainy days and sleepless nights, he falls under the spell of a to...

What happens when the American dream collides head-on with a nation's dependence on fossil fuels? "Oil and Water", a novel by Mei Mei Evans, focuses on precisely this question. Starting with a star-crossed supertanker, a wayward fishing boat, and a w...

Not for sale in Estonia! It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dand...

The men in Emil Hakl's fiction are, like the title of one story, oddballs. Whether evading the expectations of adult life, or finding themselves drawn to characters they're simultaneously repulsed by, each one holds a mirror up to the peculiar failin...

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...

Thanks to its colourful cast of characters and gritty portrayal of street life in Victorian London, Dickens Oliver Twist has captured readers hearts for over 150 years. Todays children will love it too. Oliver, a poor orphan, escapes the miserable wo...

In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, wrote the first draft of "Frankenstein" after she and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley took part in a ghost writing competition at Lord Byron's villa by Lake Geneva. Returning to England in the autumn...

One of the most powerful dramas ever written for the stage, Othello is a story of revenge, illusion, passion, mistrust, jealousy, and murder. If in Iago Shakespeare created the most compelling villain in Western literature, in Othello and Desdemona h...