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Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

'One of the greatest Japanese writers... his work explores the destructive power of erotic obsessions' Guardian
'Outstanding... rich and mysterious' New York Times Book Review
A new selection and translation of short stories by a hugely prominent classic Japanese writer, filled with eroticism and fantasy
The rich and mysterious short stories of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki pulse with a restless eroticism. Visiting a kingdom ruled by a weak-willed duke, the sage Confucius finds himself drawn into a battle of wills. A naïve servant boy is compelled down a path of vice and sin by his master's daughter. A young prince finds himself enraptured by his newest possession: a beguiling, enchanting mermaid.

These three stories, two of which are here translated for the first time by Bryan Karetnyk, capture the essence of Tanizaki's shorter writings. Drawing on tales from both Japanese and Chinese mythology, combined with poignant psychological realism, Tanizaki reveals and revels in the paper-thin line between the sublime and the depraved.

Pushkin Press

Pushkin Collection

The Siren's Lament: Essential Stories

Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis is one of the most enigmatic and fascinating story writers who ever lived. What seem at first to be stately social satires reveal unanticipated depths through hints of darkness and winking surrealism. This new selection of his finest work, translated by the prize-winning Daniel Hahn, showcases the many facets of his mercurial genius.A brilliant scientist opens the first asylum in his home town, only to start finding signs of insanity all around him. A young lieutenant basks in praise of his new position, but in solitude feels his identity fray into nothing. The reading of a much-loved, respected elder statesman's journals reveals hidden thoughts of merciless cruelty.

The Looking-Glass: Essential Stories

Daniel Hahn

Isaac Babel

A new selection of Isaac Babel's most vital and beautiful stories, in acclaimed translations by Boris Dralyuk
'It is impossible to look at the world the same way after reading Babel... one of the enduring jewels of 20th-century Russian literature' Financial Times
Isaac Babel honed one of the most distinctive styles in all Russian literature. Brashly conversational one moment, dreamily lyrical the next, his stories exult in the richness of everyday speech and sensual pleasure only to be shaken by brutal jolts of violence.
These stories take us from the underworld of Babel's native Odessa, city of gangsters and lowlives, of drunken brawls and bleeding sunsets, to the terror and absurdity of life as a soldier in the Polish-Soviet War. Selected and translated by the prize-winning Boris Dralyuk, this collection captures the irreverence, passion and coarse beauty of Babel's singular voice.

Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories

Boris Dralyuk

Nina Berberova

The first English translation of celebrated Russian writer Nina Berberova's debut novel: an intense story of family conflict and the struggle over the future of émigré life
On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs' farm. Having fled revolution and civil war in Russia, the family has worked tirelessly to establish themselves as crop farmers in Provence, their hopes of returning home a distant dream. While young Ilya Stepanovich is committed to this new way of life, his step-brother Vasya looks only to the past. With the arrival of a letter from Paris, a plot to lure Vasya back to Russia begins in earnest, and Ilya must set out for the capital to try to preserve his family's fragile stability.
The first novel by the celebrated Russian writer Nina Berberova, The Last and the First is an elegant and devastating portrayal of the internal struggles of a generation of émigrés. Appearing for the first time in English in a stunning translation by the prize-winning Marian Schwartz, it shows Berberova in full command of her gifts as a writer of masterful poise and psychological insight.

The Last and the First

Marian Schwartz

Gaito Gazdanov

The lyrical first novel of youth and love by acclaimed modernist master Gaito Gazdanov, author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf
'The Gazdanov revival... is nothing short of a literary event' TLS
Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Koyla resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes shape, so too does a portrait of lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland.
Written when Gazdanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master's debut novel, and appears here in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential émigré experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

An Evening with Claire

Katherine Mansfield

A beguiling new selection of Katherine Mansfield's finest stories, focused on her mysterious, complex portrayals of relationships between women
Katherine Mansfield was one of the true pioneers of the short story. Her style shifts subtly between the comic and the tragic, as calm surfaces are punctured by moments of disruption, insight and strange beauty.
This new collection gathers together the best of Mansfield's work exploring different facets of relationships between women. From complex expressions of desire and connection to shared experiences of frustration and release, these stories capture fleeting movements of feeling with unmatched precision.

Strange Bliss: Essential Stories

Alexander Pushkin

A dazzling new collection of Pushkin's most essential fiction, in definitive translations by the acclaimed Anthony Briggs
Pushkin's restless creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories, among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Brigg's finely nuanced translations.
Upending expectations at every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humour. These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourages his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly woman's secret for success at cards with bizarre results, in 'The Queen of Spades'; and in The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin's great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.

The Captain's Daughter: Essential Stories

Anthony Briggs

George Orwell

A new collection that celebrates Orwell's status as England's greatest social chronicler
No writer understood the English quite like George Orwell. In unravelling the hypocrisies and contradictions of a nation, he found himself in harried pursuit of an elephant across colonial-era Myanmar, crawling hundreds of feet below ground in a sweltering mine, locked inside the brutal confines of a twentieth-century workhouse, and sifting through the grusome pages of tabloid murder reportage. Amidst the brutality and peculiarity of all that he encountered, Orwell's sharp gaze and magnificent prose style never faltered.
This collection pairs Orwell's masterpiece on English socialism, 'The Lion and the Unicorn', with four shorter sketches from across the country and the British Empire. Tenacious and startlingly erudite, they are the essential writings from England's greatest social chronicler.
George Orwell (1903-1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was a novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. He served as an Imperial Police Officer in Myanmar (formerly Burma), lived in near-destitution in Paris and fought with the Republican army in the Spanish Civil War. His powerful explorations, in both novels and essays, of totalitarianism and fascism firmly established the adjective 'Orwellian' in the English language.

England Your England: Notes on a Nation

Rainer Maria Rilke

A collection of haunting, mystical poems of the night by the great Rainer Maria Rilke, appearing together for the first time in English
In 1916, Rainer Maria Rilke presented his friend Rudolf Kassner with a notebook, containing twenty-two poems meticulously inscribed in his own hand and bearing the title Poems to Night. This evocative sequence of poems, which echoes some of the great themes of German romanticism, is now thought to represent one of the key stages in the creative breakthrough and spiritual evolution of the pre-eminent European poet of the twentieth century.
This collection brings all the poems together in English for the first time and is enhanced by a rich selection of further poems Rilke dedicated to night at various stages of his life. The Poems to Night and the background to them are illuminated by the translator's insightful introduction.

Poems to Night

Will Stone

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

A stylishly original collection of seven newly translated stories from the iconic Japanese writer
From a nobleman's court, to the garden of paradise, to a lantern festival in Tokyo, these stories offer dazzling glimpses into moments of madness, murder and obsession. A talented yet spiteful painter is given over to depravity in pursuit of artistic brilliance. In the depth of hell, a robber spies a single spider's thread being lowered towards him. When a body is found in an isolated bamboo grove, a kaleidoscopic account of violence and desire begins to unfold.
These are short stories from an unparalleled master of the form. Sublimely crafted and stylishly original, Akutagawa's writing is shot through with a fantastical sensibility. This collection, in a vivid new translation by Bryan Karetnyk, brings together the most essential works from this iconic Japanese writer.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was one of Japan's leading literary figures in the Taishō period. Regarded as the father of the Japanese short story, he produced over 150 in his short lifetime. Haunted by the fear that he would inherit his mother's madness, Akutagawa suffered from worsening mental health problems towards the end of his life and committed suicide aged 35 by taking an overdose of barbiturates.
Bryan Karetnyk is a scholar and translator of Japanese and Russian literature. His recent translations for Pushkin Press include Gaito Gazdanov's The Beggar and Other Stories and Irina Odoevtseva's Isolde.

Murder in the Age of Enlightenment: Essential Stories

Joseph Roth

New translations of the greatest short stories by Joseph Roth, collected in a beautiful edition
Joseph Roth's sensibility - both clear-eyed and nostalgic, harshly realistic and tenderly humane - produced some of the most distinctive fiction of the twentieth century. This selection of his finest shorter work, in exquisite new translations by Ruth Martin, showcases Roth's peerless skill as an observer of social discord and individual frailty.
A coral merchant, longing for the sea, chooses to adulterate his wares with false corla, with catastrophic results; young Fini, just entering the haze of early sexuality, falls into an unsatisfying relationship with an older musician. In prose of fluid beauty and wry precision, Roth shows us isolated souls pursuing lost ideals in the Austro-Hungarian empire's dying days.
JOSEPH ROTH was born into a Jewish family in the small town of Brody in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied first in Lemberg and then in Vienna, and served in the Austrian army during the first World War. He later worked a a journalist in Vienna and Berlin, travelling widely, staying in hotels and living out of suitcases while also being a prolific writer of fiction, including the novels Job (1930) and The Radetsky March (1932). Roth left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933 and settled in Paris. He collapsed at the Café Touron in May 1939 and died shortly after.

The Coral Merchant: Essential Stories

Ruth Martin

Various Authors

A collection of chilling tales from the dark heart of American literature
A masquerade ball cut short by a mysterious plague; a strange nocturnal ritual in the woods; a black bobcat howling in the night: these ten tales are some of the most strange and unsettling in all of American literature, filled with unforgettable imagery and simmering with tension. From Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Zora Neale Hurston, the authors of these classics of supernatural suspense have inspired generations of writers to explore the dark heart of the land of the free.
The stories in this collection have been selected and introduced by Laird Hunt, an author of seven acclaimed novels which explore the shadowy corners of American history.
Contains:
'The Masque of the Red Death', Edgar Allan Poe'Young Goodman Brown', Nathaniel Hawthorne'The Eyes', Edith Wharton'The Mask', Robert Chambers'Home', Shirley Jackson'A Ghost Story', Mark Twain'Spunk', Zora Neale Hurston'The Yellow Wallpaper', Charlotte Perkins Gilman'An Itinerant House', Emma Frances Dawson
Laird Hunt is an American writer and translator. He has written seven novels, including Neverhome, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, an IndieNext selection, winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine and The Bridge prize, and a finalist for the Prix Femina Étranger. His In the House in the Dark of the Woods is also available from Pushkin Press. A resident of Boulder, CO, he is on the faculty in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Denver.

American Midnight: Tales of the Dark

Heinrich von Kleist

A vivid new translation of a timeless classic: Kleist's tense, ambiguous novella about an unexpected pregnancy
In a Northern Italian town, a young widowed noblewoman of impeccable reputation publishes a peculiar announcement in a newspaper: she has found herself inexplicably pregnant, and would like the father of the child to make himself known so that she can marry him.
The Marquise of O- is the dizzyingly comic tale of how she came to this extremity. It is a story of layered ironies, of events misreported and passions at cross purposes. Nicholas Jacobs' fluid new translation captures the novella's restless pace and complexity, as each masterful twist of Kleist's prose plunges us deeper into the ambiguities of truth and human desire.
Heinrich von Kleist was born in 1777 into a Prussian military family in Frankfurt an der Oder. He entered the army at a young age, serving in a Guards regiment under the Duke of Brunswick. He later studied law and philosophy in his hometown before doing clerical work for the Ministry of Finance in Berlin. Kleist wrote poetry, philosophical essays, plays, short stories and novellas, most famously Michael Kohlhaas and The Marquise of O-.

The Marquise of O–

Nicholas Jacobs

Madeleine Bourdouxhe

Enchanting stories of women's inner lives by the rediscovered Belgian author Madeleine Bourdouxhe
These are stories of longing and dissatisfaction, of daily life ruptured by strange currents of feeling. A woman, wandering alone and heartbroken, is first attacked and then romantically pursued by a stranger. A maid wears her mistress's expensive coat to meet her lover, but finds herself more preoccupied by fantasies of intimacy with 'Madame'. A woman gives birth on the day foreign troops invade the city, and must flee with her newborn on the back of a truck.
Written in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Europe, and admired by the Existentialists and the Surrealists alike, these stories are now translated with extraordinary clarity by Faith Evans. With piercing insight and candour, Madeleine Bourdouxhe illuminates the conflicted hearts of the housewife, the mother, and the maid. These unforgettable tales of ordinary women are suffused with desire and melancholy, memory and fantasy, and lit by the furnace burning just beneath the surface of everyday life.
Madeleine Bourdouxhe was born in Belgium in 1906. She moved to Paris with her parents during the First World War before returning to Brussels to study Philosophy. Her first novel, La Femme de Gilles, was published in 1937, and a second novel, Marie, followed in 1943. Interest in her work revived in the 1980s, with both novels being reprinted and translated into many languages, and her collection of stories A Nail, A Rose first appeared in English in 1989. Bourdouxhe died in Brussels in 1996.

A Nail, A Rose

Faith Evans

Georg Simmel

A quartet of essays on great European cities from the groundbreaking thinker Georg Simmel
'Vnice possesses the ambiguous beauty of adventure, floating rootlessly through life, like a torn flower borne on the sea'
Georg Simmel was a brilliant, groundbreaking thinker, whose wide-ranging lectures held audiences spellbound in turn-of-the-century Berlin and throughout Europe. The theories of this maverick 'wandering-priest' left their mark on a whole generation of philosophers, poets and sociologists, including Heidegger and Rilke.
The quartet of essays contained in this book includes dazzling portraits of Italy's iconic cities of art and history, as well as Simmel's hugely influential 'The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit', one of the most important analyses of urban life and the alienation of the individual ever written.
Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was one of the first generation of German sociologists and an acquaintance of Max Weber. His study of philosophy, his wide reading in history and the sciences and his astute criticism meant Simmel became a renowned intellectual in his lifetime. He was known for his illuminating lectures and rare gifts as a speaker, exploring topics including the effect of the modern metropolis on human psychology, the philosophy of history and the philosophy of money.

Pushkin Collection - The book series

Pushkin Collection - The book series

Pushkin Collection books in order

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