Pushkin Press

'The time provides the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation - our unique generation, carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history.' During his lifetime, Stefan Zweig's (1881-1942) works were immensely popular and widely translated. In the decades after his death, he was largely f...

After a day of being dumped-twice-and accidentally killing a goose, the narrator begins to dream of trop- ical holidays far away from the chaos of her current life. Instead, she finds her plans wrecked by her best friend's deaf-mute son, thrust into her reluctant care. But when a shared lottery ticket nets the two of them over 40 million kroner, she and the boy head off on a road trip across Iceland, taking...

Kafka, whose name has generated an adjective, is one of the best loved writers of the twentieth century. Known for his dark, enigmatic stories, for the absurd nightmares he depicts, his extraordinary imaginative depth is clear in stories from 'A Hunger Artist' to 'The Verdict'.

When I am on a journey, all ties suddenly fall away. I feel myself quite unburdened, disconnected, free - There is something in it marvellously uplifting and invigorating. Whole past epochs suddenly return: nothing is lost, everything still full of inception, enticement.

In a Northern Italian town during the Napoleonic Wars, Julietta, a young widow and mother of impeccable reputation, finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. This follows an attack on the town's citadel, in which several Russian soldiers tried to assault her before she was rescued by Count F-, at which point she fell unconscious. Thrown out of her father's house, Julietta publishes an announcement in the local n...

A beautifully illustrated new translation of a beloved Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale Six young sisters live in the depths of the ocean, longing for the chance to see the beauty of the earth. Most eager of all is the youngest mermaid, who counts the days to her fifteenth birthday when her grandmother will finally allow her to rise to the surface. Her first sight above the water is a large ship on ...

When 20-year-old student J. S. Margot took a tutoring job in 1987, little did she know it would open up an entire world. In the family's Orthodox Jewish household she would encounter endless rules - 'never come on a Friday, never shake hands with a man' - and quirks she had not seen before: tiny tubes on the doorposts, separate fridges for meat and dairy products. Her initial response was puzzlement and...

Democracy is difficult, flawed and unstable. It involves barely distinguishable political parties taking part in lengthy, overcomplicated and expensive decision-making processes. Trying to engage so many people with political issues seems to lead only to complexity and disagreement. So why bother? Doesn't fascism guarantee a more effective and efficient management of the state?

From the moment of her birth to her death on the scaffold, Mary Stuart spent her life embroiled in power struggles that shook the foundations of Renaissance Europe. Revered by some as the rightful Queen of England, reviled by others as a murderous adultress, her long and fascinating rivalry with her cousin Elizabeth I led ultimately to her downfall. This classic biography, by one of the most popular writers...

Six young sisters live in the depths of the ocean, longing for the chance to see the beauty of the earth. Most eager of all is the youngest mermaid, who counts the days to her fifteenth birthday when her grandmother will finally allow her to rise to the surface.

A rediscovered classic of American noir -- a suspenseful masterpiece about corrupted love Amy Kellogg is not having a pleasant vacation in Mexico. She's been arguing nonstop with her friend and traveling companion, Wilma, and she wants nothing more than to go home to California. But their holiday takes a nightmarish turn when Wilma is found dead on the street below their room--an apparent suicide. Rup...

An apartment on the rue Morgue turned into a charnel house; the corpse of a shopgirl dragged from the Seine; a high-stakes game of political blackmail-three mysteries that have enthralled the whole of Paris, and baffled the city's police. The brilliant Chevalier Auguste Dupin investigates - can he find the solution where so many others before him have failed?

"Vivid, full of sardonic humour, moral nuance and personal drama, this book takes the reader into the heart of the revolutionary crowd, and shows how exhilarating and terrifying it is to be there" Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content", but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut ...

Although best known for his monumental novels, Tolstoy also wrote tightly compressed works of equal power. This new collection gathers perhaps his greatest novella, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', together with shorter masterpieces 'Three Deaths', 'Pace-setter' and the fable-like story 'Alyosha the Pot'.

Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol's greatest short stories collected in a beautiful edition Admired by writers from Nabokov to Bulgakov to George Saunders, Gogol is considered one of the more enigmatic of the Russian greats. He only wrote one novel, 'Dead Souls', and destroyed much of his later work, so his stories constitute his major output. In this collection, beautifully and skilfully trans...

Stuck in the traditional community of Badfish Creek, Elwyn longs for change. When his uncle offers him the chance to leave his rural roots behind, he jumps at the opportunity, eager to move to Liberty to gain an education and become part of a flourishing world. Finally, life seems to be opening up to him.

Meet Zeze - Brazil's naughtiest and most loveable boy, his talent for mischief matched only by his great kindness. When he grows up he wants to be a 'poet with a bow-tie' but for now he entertains himself playing pranks on the residents of his family's poor Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood and inventing friends to play with. That is, until he meets a real friend, and his life begins to change...

Mixing business and family is a recipe for disaster The popular Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland has been serving devoted regulars for decades. Yet behind the staff's professional smiles simmer tensions, heartaches and grudges from years of bustling restaurant life. When disaster strikes, two of the younger generation find themselves in a dangerous game that means tragedy for the Duck House. And ...

In January 1933, on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth fled to Paris. There, in what he called the 'hour before the end of the world', he wrote a series of articles. The end he foresaw would soon come to pass in the full horror of Hitler's barbarism, the Second World War and most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness.