"Victor Serge (1890-1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-czarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living "by chance" in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge...

"This volume presents Pushkin at his most questioning and experimental. "Peter the Great's African" is his first attempt at representing the man he saw as the most important of all Russian tsars. Here Pushkin presents him from the perspective of Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather, a former African slave whom Peter the Great educated and made into one of his closest confidants; Pushkin's central concern in this story is the success or failure of...

"Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere...

"A Very Old Man collects five linked stories, parts of an unfinished novel that the great Triestine writer Italo Svevo wrote at the end of his life, when the international success of Zeno's Conscience in 1923 had put an end to decades of literary neglect and set his imagination free. Here Svevo revisits with new vigor and agility themes that fascinated him from the start--aging, deceit, and self-deception, as well as the fragility, fecklessness, and...

"In The Door, in Iza's Ballad, and in Abigail, Magda Szabó describes the complex relationships between women of different ages and backgrounds with an astute and unsparing eye. Eszter, the narrator and protagonist of The Fawn, may well be Szabó's most fascinating creation. Eszter, an only child, her father an eccentric aristocrat and steeply downwardly mobile flower breeder, her mother a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, grows up...

"Susan Taubes (1928-1969), born Judit Zsuzsanna Feldmann in Budapest, was the daughter of a psychoanalyst and the granddaughter of a rabbi. She and her father emigrated to the United States in 1939, settling in Rochester, New York. She attended Bryn Mawr as an undergraduate, and in 1949 married the rabbinically trained scholar Jacob Taubes. Taubes studied philosophy and religion in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne, and at Radcliffe, where she wrote her...

"Though written at the end of the first half of the twentieth century this is essentially a nineteenth century novel written with a twentieth century sensibility. A few things give it away as a twentieth century novel - regular trains, even to remote rural areas, and a gramophone as well as the fact that, unlike most nineteenth century novels, none of the main characters survives unscarred. Indeed, most of them die, usually relatively unpleasant deaths....

"On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen) is a novella by Ernst Jünger published in 1939 describing the upheaval and ruin of a serene agricultural society. The peaceful and traditional people, located on the shores of a large bay, are surrounded by the rough pastoral folk in the surrounding hills, who feel increasing pressure from the unscrupulous and lowly followers of the dreaded head forester. The narrator and protagonist lives on the marble...

"Manchette wrote two novels using the character of private eye Eugene Tarpon, Morgue pleine (Crowded day at the Morgue) and Que d'os! (Skeletons in the Closet!). Tarpon is a French private detective, a former cop responsible for the death of a protester, eaten up by grief, with a wry and weary outlook on the world, who gets mixed up in very tangled cases à la Raymond Chandler, another of Manchette's favorite writers"--