A vivid new translation of a timeless classic: Kleist’s tense, ambiguous novella about an unexpected pregnancyIn 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 newspaper stating that she is pregnant and would like the father of her child to make himself known so that she can marry him.What follows is an ambiguously comic drama of sexuality and family respectability. One of Kleist’s best-loved works, The Marquise of O— is an ingenious and timeless story of the mystery of human desire, and Nicholas Jacobs’s new translation captures the full richness of its irony.

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:Long After Midnight (Далеко за полночь)Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

The novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister growing up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss at its junction with the more minor River Ripple near the village of St. Ogg's in England, probably in the 1820s after the Napoleonic Wars but before the Reform Act of 1832. Both the river and the village are fictional.The novel spans a period of 10 to 15 years, from Tom’s and Maggie’s childhood up until their deaths in a flood on the Floss. The book is fictional autobiography in part, reflecting the disgrace that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) herself had while in a lengthy relationship with a married man, George Henry Lewes. (Wikipedia)Классический "роман характеров" Джордж Элиот "Мельница на Флоссе" — один из лучших романов писательницы. Обаятельная Мэгги Талливер не вписывается в окружение, к которому принадлежит по рождению, не может быть понята даже самыми близкими людьми. Особую боль Мэгги причиняет её необыкновенно прочная привязанность к брату Тому, представляющему собой полную противоположность сестре… (И.И.Бурова в кн.: Сидорченко Л.В. и др. — История западноевропейской литературы. XIX век: Англия. СПб, 2004)

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:Long After Midnight (Далеко за полночь)Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

“Buck has never done better work than this. By a great gift of intuition she has entered into the mind, heart and spirit of the Chinese peasant woman and revealed the permanent values of life.” —The Times Literary Supplement.Dickensian in its epic sweep, one of Buck’s finest novels centers on an unnamed peasant woman in pre-revolutionary China. Without warning, her restless husband abandons her. Shamed by the experience, she is left to work the land, raise their three children on her own, and care for her aging mother-in-law. To save face with her neighbors, she pretends her husband is traveling, and sends letters to herself signed in his name. Surrounded by poverty, despair, and a growing web of lies meant to protect the family, her children grow up and enter society with only the support of their mother’s unbreakable will. An unforgettable story of one woman’s strength and a remarkable fable about the role of mothers, this novel is a powerful achievement by a master of twentieth-century fiction.

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:The Golden Apples of the Sun (Золотые яблоки солнца)The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

The first genuine mystery novel written by Dickens was never finished and was published posthumously in 1870 leaving the mystery unsolved forever. The choirmaster of Cloisterham, Jack Jasper, has a ward named Edwin Drood, a respectable young man engaged to Rosa Bud. Underneath the respectability Drood is an opium addict and no longer loves Rosa, the secret love of Jasper. Drood breaks the engagement and disappears completely. Also in love with Rosa, Neville Landless is arrested for Drood's murder, but released for lack of a body. Fearing Rosa's feelings for Landless, Jasper confesses his love and threatens to further implicate Landless in the murder unless she returns his love. The manuscript ends as Datchery, a shadowy character bedeviling Jasper, is introduced. Speculation abounds, but the mystery remains.

Island hoping across the South Pacific, the esteemed Dr. Saunders is offered passage by Captain Nichols and his companion Fred Blake, two men who appear unsavory, yet any means of transportation is hard to resist. The trip turns turbulent, however, when a vicious storm forces them to seek shelter on the remote island of Kanda. There these three men fall under the spell of the sultry and stunningly beautiful Louise, and their story spirals into a wicked tale of love, murder, jealousy, and suicide.\n\nA tense, exotic tale of love, jealousy, murder and suicide, which evolved from a passage in Maugham’s earlier masterpiece, The Moon and Sixpence.

The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel. published in 1952, is also the first — and some would say still the best — literary novel written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals ot postwar Jewish life, takes on very different material — the story of a superbly gifted "natural' at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era — and invests it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades after the novel's publication, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which — now that he has done it! — looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology".