A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europe's last great humanists."A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life" Paul Bailey, IndependentIn August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerb's last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age. Written in war-torn Hungary in the early 1940s, it constitutes a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which the writer lived and died.Antal Szerb (1901–1945) was born in Budapest. Though of Jewish descent, he was baptised at an early age and remained a lifelong Catholic. He rapidly established himself as a formidable scholar, through studies of Ibsen and Blake and histories of English, Hungarian and world literature. He was a prolific essayist and reviewer, ranging across all the major European languages. Debarred by successive Jewish laws from working in a university, he was subjected to increasing persecution, and finally murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945. Pushkin Press publishes his novels The Pendragon Legend, Oliver VII and his masterpiece Journey by Moonlight, as well as the historical study The Queen's Necklace and Love in a Bottle and Other Stories.

An early novel from the great rediscovered Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, The Rebels is a haunting story of a group of alienated boys on the cusp of adult life—and possibly death—during World War I.It is the summer of 1918, and four boys approaching graduation are living in a ghost town bereft of fathers, uncles, and older brothers, who are off fighting at the front. The boys know they will very soon be sent to join their elders, and in their final weeks of freedom they begin acting out their frustrations and fears in a series of subversive games and petty thefts. But when they attract the attention of a stranger in town—an actor with a traveling theater company—their games, and their lives, begin to move in a direction they could not have predicted and cannot control, and one that reveals them to be strangers to one another. Resisting and defying adulthood, they find themselves still subject to its baffling power even in their attempted rebellion.

The Rescue was originally published in 1920; it concludes what is sometimes referred to as The Lingard Trilogy, a group of novels based on Conrad's experience as mate on the steamer, Vidar. Although it was the last of the three novels to be published, after Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), the events related in the novel precede those. The Rescue is a tersely written adventure novel with all the power and scope one would expect from Joseph Conrad.

Перед вами – иной Оруэлл. Не писатель, но – философ, литературный критик и журналист (строго говоря, создатель жанра «новой журналистики»). Человек, творящий подлинно высокую публицистику – и обращающий ее в истинное искусство слова!Эссе Оруэлла всегда умные, изысканно-злые и в чем-то парадоксальные.Сейчас, как и в прошлом, многим они кажутся спорными и «скандальными». Почему? Да потому, что Джордж Оруэлл всегда современен!

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:The Illustrated Man (Человек в картинках)R Is For Rocket (Р — значит ракета)Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:The Illustrated Man (Человек в картинках)R Is For Rocket (Р — значит ракета)The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

Originally published in Japanese in 1959, this classic novel by Yasushi Inoue takes place during the Japanese Warring Era (1467–1573)-a time when Japan was ruled by three young powerful warlords: Takeda Shingen, Iwagawa Yoshimoto, and Hojo Ujiyasu. The story focuses on Takeda Shingen and his one-eyed, crippled strategist, Yamamoto Kansuke. The brilliant strategies of Kansuke, inspired by his passion for war and his admiration for his enemies' war tactics, are beautifully expressed throughout this book.

This book contains the following stories: The Schoolmaster, Enemies, The Examining Magistrate, Betrothed, From the Diary of a Violent-Tempered Man, In the Dark, A Play, A Mystery, Strong Impressions, Drunk, The Marshal’s Widow, A Bad Business, In the Court, Boots, Joy, Ladies, A Peculiar Man, At the Barber’s, An Inadvertence, The Album, Oh The Public, A Tripping Tongue, Overdoing It, The Orator, Malingerers, In the Graveyard, Hush , In an Hotel, and In a Strange Land.

The Schoolmistress and Other Stories contains twenty-one tales by Russian master of drama and the short story, Anton Chekhov. Among the stories is one of Chekhov’s classics, The Bet, in which a greedy banker makes an ill-considered bet regarding capital punishment with a young and impressionable guest. Fifteen years later – the surprise ending provides one of Chekhov’s most thought-provoking tales. The title story is a careful reminder of the soul-deadening life of a teacher in the Russian countryside – for in Russia of Chekhov’s day, education was less-valued than it is today, and teachers greatly underpaid and undervalued. Chekhov was of a different social background than more aristocratic Russian authors such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev – this offered him an insight into character that differed from theirs. A physician as well, Chekhov’s observational skills are clear in this, as with all of his collections of short fiction. These stories will remind the reader of other 19th Century masters of short fiction, such as Maupassant. But their nature, and poetic irony, is exclusively that of Anton Chekhov.

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:Dark Carnival (Тёмный карнавал)The October Country (Октябрьская страна)The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.

Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town," a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques