Determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammelled individual will, Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the Tsars, commits an act of murder and theft and sets into motion a story which, for its excrutiating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its profundity of characterization and vision, is almost unequaled in the literatures of the world. The best known of Dostoevsky's masterpieces, Crime and Punishment...

The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century, Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is aroused to erotic desire only by a young girl. Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of...

Deals with the harsh lives of northern Russian villagers post World War II.

An orphaned poet, a gifted pianist and a budding photographer meet in a mid-20th-century Moscow school and eventually embody the heroism, folly, compromise and hope of the Soviet dissident experience.

Kazakhstan has an incredibly rich and deep literary heritage, from folk tales of the steppe to epic poems and from ajtys narrative singing to modernist short stories and novels. But until now, readers in English have been denied the opportunity to access the great trove of Kazakh literature, as it remained largely untranslated. As such, this anthology represents a new epoch, in which a range of Kazakh literary voices from the 20th century can be discovered...