Karel Capek, author of the acclaimed "War with the Newts, " is one of the great Czechoslovak writers of the twentieth century. These fairy tales bear Capek's combination of the fantastic and the satirical, offering fairies, elves, and talking animals alongside references to detectives, secret police agents, luxury automobiles, and Hollywood starlets. Filled with the delight of language, dazzling wordplay, a sense of absurdity about the so-called adult world, and a deeply humane vision, these witty stories will appeal to readers of all ages.

Though published a decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, "The Tragic Menagerie" possesses a sensibility that is modern in its descriptions of a childhood of passionate affections and unsettling revelations. This fictionalized autobiography follows the tomboyish Vera, who counts among her friends bears, wolves, and a wild crane, as well as local peasant girls. Sent to a German boarding school and exiled from her kingdom, Vera turns into a demonic, disobedient student, rejecting a life she finds constraining and artificial. Only when she returns to her natural world can her deeper...

Danilo Kis was one of the most artful and eloquent writers of postwar Europe. Of all his books, "Hourglass, " the account of the final months in one man's life before he is sent to a concentration camp, is considered to be his masterpiece.

The most famous collection of short fiction by acclaimed Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis. In these nine stories Kis depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes--the multitude of details that make up a human life. Kis combines fiction and history in postmodern style, and in a postscript provides fascinating historical backgrounds and other notes for the reader that add interest and context. An enduring classic of Slavic literary fiction.

Originally published in Poland in 1948, and acclaimed as one of the finest postwar Polish novels, Ashes and Diamonds takes place in the spring of 1945, as the nation is in the throes of its transformation to People' Poland. Communists, socialists, and nationalists; thieves and black marketeers; servants and fading aristocrats; veteran terrorists and bands of murderous children bewitched by the lure of crime and adventure--all of these converge on a provincial town's chief hotel, a microcosm of an uprooted world.

This captivating novel is the summation of Odoevsky's views and interests in many fields: Gothic literature, romanticism, mysticism, the occult, social responsibility, Westernization, utopia and anti-utopia. Compared to "The Decameron, " to Hoffman's "Serapion Brethren, "and to the Platonic dialogues, "Russian Nights" is a unique mixture of romantic and society tales framed by Odoevsky's musings on strands of Russian thought and his own obsessions.

In this retelling of the biblical story, King Solomon commissions Ethan the Scribe to write the official history of King David. In return for the finest cooking in the land and the wages of a minor prophet, Ethan must write a proper record, full of glory and battles, statecraft and honor--a tribute to David and, of course, to Solomon, his heir. But as Ethan explores the story, he finds another life hidden behind the iron curtain dividing past from present: the story of a David who seduced, lied, bragged, and plundered his way to power. Ethan wonders: which life should be reported in the King...

Combining traditional elements with the fantastic and the surreal, Ivanov's stories address not only the themes of the Russian revolution but also the quiet world of man and nature, and the elemental bond that tied peasants to their native land.

Widely regarded as a major writer of his generation, Yuri Trifonov tolerated attack and admiration in the Soviet Union. His novellas are celebrated as being in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing. In "Another Life," a woman suddenly widowed attempts to grasp the memory of her brilliant, erratic husband, and to understand their life together. "The House on the Embankment" is the story of an academic opportunist who rises to apparatchik but suffers the oppression of society, friends, and most of all his inability to make decisions.

"The Old Man" veers between a contemporary effort to buy a dacha and the memories of an incident in the Civil War. A questionable action in the past haunts the present and throws into relief the materialism that has come to replace revolutionary idealism; suggesting this idealism may have been tainted in the first place. While the setting and situation are very Soviet, the quandary Trifonov describes has universal significance.