Literature

In this lyrical and artfully woven memoir, a short road trip to California’s Central Coast becomes an epic journey through family history, loss, and connection.

Both texts return us to Kundera’s much-missed living presence. Subtle and full of wit and irony, 89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing Poem is an homage to a literary legend and a reminder of just how prescient his words and insights are today.

Osip Mandelshtam, arguably the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, died in a Stalinist prison camp at the age of 47. This volume collects the best of his work, including poems he was unable to publish in his lifetime.

Full of talk, philosophical speculation and dark humor, this sweeping, intricately structured novel challenges the form even as it presents a highly original view of the world and the former Soviet Union.

Joseph Brodsky's Nativity Poems are beautifully translated and presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

A poem by Alexander Solzhenitsyn from 1950. 

A Part of Speech contains poems from the years 1965-1978, translated by various hands.
"Like the Auden who was, no less than Lowell, his champion, Brodsky is a master of traditional forms." - The New York Times Book Review

Brodsky writes in Watermark that water “stores our reflections for when we are long gone.” This edition of one of Brodsky’s most important titles allows the reader to visit the canals of Brodsky’s Venice and rediscover the reflection of Brodsky himself.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an undisputed classic of contemporary literature. First published (in censored form) in 1962, it is the story of a labor-camp inmate as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression.

A glorious retelling of the Russian folktale Marya Morevna and Koschei the Deathless from Catherynne M. Valente, set in a mysterious version of St. Petersburg during the first half of the 20th century.

One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the cancerous Soviet police state.

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history" (Nina Krushcheva, The Nation).