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Ivan Krylov has been loved by Russian people for two hundred years for his Fables, works in which he gently satirizes the manifold weaknesses and failings of human beings, especially figures of authority, while at the same time praising and holding up for emulation the qualities in ordinary people of selflessness, industry, loyalty, love, friendship, perseverance...e ]Solid, earthy common sense and a long acquaintance with the ways of the world lie at the root of Krylov's observations. Some of the Fables are no more than humorous glimpses of life and human nature, or snapshots of the bizarre preoccupations of fantasists, eccentrics, idealists and dreamers. Others offer wry, sardonic glimpses of life, and human relationships and behaviour. Yet others offer wise advice on the conduct of life, or are "cautionary tales" warnings about the consequences of ill-considered behaviour.

The Other Side tells of a dream kingdom which becomes a nightmare, of a journey to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia, which is also a journey to the depths of the subconcious, or as Kubin himself called it, 'a sort of Baedeker for those lands which are half known to us'. Written in 1908, and more or less half way between Meyrink and Kafka, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation. ' Expressionist illustrator Kubin wrote this fascinating curio, his only literary work in 1908. A town named Pearl, assembled and presided over by the aptly named Patera, is the setting for his hallucinatory vision of a society founded on instinct over reason. Culminating apocalyptically - plagues of insects, mountains of corpses and orgies in the street - it is worth reading for its dizzying surrealism alone. Though ostensibly a gothic macabre fantasy, it is tempting to read The Other Side as a satire on the reactionary, idealist utopianism evident in German thought in the early twentieth century, highly prescient in its gloom, given later developments. The language often suggests Nietsche. The inevitable collapse of Patera's creation is lent added horror by hindsight. Kubin's depiction of absurd bureaucracy is strongly reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, and his flawed utopia, situated next to a settlement of supposed savages, brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World; it precedes both novels, and this superb new translation could demonstrate its influence on subsequent modern literature.' Kieron Pim in Time Out It will appeal to fans of Mervyn Peake and readers who like the darkly decadent, the fantastic and the grotesque in their reading.

Part traditional fable, part thriller, Tchanaze is a tale of magic and witchcraft, but also a portrayal of a world where traditions are preyed upon and superstitions exploited to hide evil, yet all-too-human truths. Tchanaze is the pride of Sena, a virgin and a beauty coveted throughout the Zambeze region. Mbemba is deemed ugly in comparison and fears she will never find a husband. Her mother employs a witchdoctor to expel the evil spirits from Mbema and put them in Tchanaze, who subsequently dies. But word reaches Campira, a shaman from Sena, that Tchanaze is alive and living in a village further up the valley. He takes Thomossene and Suplera, Tchanaze's parents, on a mission to rescue their daughter and liberate her from the curse. But to do this they must rely on the fearsome satanic witchdoctor, Phanga.

This is the first new translation of En Route since C. Kegan Paul's expurgated original of 1895, which censored or completely cut sections dealing with Durtal's sexual obsessions. Restoring these cuts serves to heighten the drama surrounding Durtal's existential crisis, and gives the novel a perspective that has hitherto been lacking for English-speaking readers. En Route was J.-K. Huysmans' first novel after his conversion to Catholicism and effectively opens a trilogy of novels detailing the spiritual journey of his alter-ego protagonist, Durtal. The novel caused a sensation on its first publication, not just because of the surprisingly frank descriptions of Durtal's obsessive sexual thoughts, but also because Huysmans' was still best known as a disciple of Zola's Naturalist school and few expected this frank and detailed account of a conversion from a writer who only a few years previously had scandalized the Parisian literary world with his Satanic novel of 1891, La-bas.

Human Sadness is a classic Georgian novel translated into English for the first time. Set in the harsh mountain world of Soviet Georgia, Goderdzi Chokheli's 1984 novel is a journey through life, where 'every character is a story', where the real and the magical intermingle. The story is narrated by five distinct voices, each of which was translated by a different translator in order to preserve its individuality. The book begins as a frustrated young novelist comes across a collection of notebooks and letters documenting a strange military campaign, of which his grandmother was a part. One winter, the inhabitants of Chokhi, a remote village - primarily women, children and old men, as most of the young men are away tending to their flocks - decide to reassert their power over the neighbouring villages in Gudamaqari Gorge. Traditionally, Chokhi has reigned supreme in the region, with Chokhian men enjoying the right to claim any women from the surrounding villages as their wives. When a Chokhian boy is turned down, his mother enlists the other villagers in a campaign to conquer the other villages. Along the way, the Chokhians document their progress and collect the worries, memories, folktales and philosophical musings of both their fellow conquerors and the villages they conquer.

While the radio announcer reports new conflicts and atrocities every day and beggars line the pavements outside her comfortable apartment, the old woman struggles to maintain her grip on life. It is a ridiculous age, she tells an acquaintance. Almost everyone she used to know and love is dead. Only her ancient cat and her best friend Malvina are left, and Malvina is rapidly sliding into senility. But the old woman's real and constant grief is the loss of her lover, Nora, ten years ago. In this disintegrating world, her lifeline is an immigrant worker, Gabriela, the home help. But Gabriela is being hounded for money by her dysfunctional family, which includes the self-styled 'terrorist' Dorin. How far can an elderly and cultivated woman, still feisty if increasingly world-weary and prickly, allow herself to be drawn into the affairs of a young woman she does not entirely trust? A brilliant evocation of the challenges of old age, Margherita Giacobino's caustic and funny novel is a tragi-comedy whose unexpected and dramatic conclusion will leave the reader gasping.

A bitter January day on the outskirts of a small Irish university town, and Fox, a reclusive researcher, has just received a phone call. His former girlfriend Clara has brought word that his mentor and love rival Stoyte is gravely ill and, what's more, the dying man has some final things he needs to say. Now Fox must set out through the snow and ice to reckon with the ghosts of the past. Poignant, haunting, and absurdly comic, A Mind of Winter is a tale of lost lives, guilt, punishment, and the cruelties we inflict upon ourselves and others.

In Budapest Noir 1945, 1956 and 1974 merge into 1991 and a nation is allowed to remember the dark days of its past and come to terms with its history before seeking to move on to a different future. The novel starts with Ilona getting a phone installed in 1991. This banal act has huge significance as before the fall of the Communist government Ilona was not allowed to have a phone as her husband took part in the 1956 Uprising and her son escaped in 1974. In 1991 with the aid of a Fullbright Scholarship with his wife and small child Ilona's son Emil returns to Budapest for the first time to create an exhibition about Hungary's transition to democracy. Ilona wants her son to get back what had been stolen from them by the Communists and make them rich while Emil just wants to make art and learn about the past. This clash of values nearly spells disaster. There are flashbacks to the Russian army arriving in 1945 and the uprising in 1956. The novel recounts the dark and tragic events which took place. It is hard not to be moved to tears by what Ilona and her family had to endure. Her story is one that she shared with countless others in Budapest and Hungary during those dark days. Ilona never complains and never talks about the past, it is a weight she carries in silence.

This is the story of a story that plays out in real life. Tom is a stock controller. Though management of the shelves kept him busy in the daytime, his nights were frightful. Again and again he dreamt of guns, conjuring tricks, car chases, burials, disinterments, Martian landscapes and Molly. Tom is new to the Story as it was known to the sinister crew who first appeared in The Runes Have Been Cast. They make their reappearance in this new novel... Molly is a hoplophiliac, Quentin is the sort of person who knows what a hoplophiliac is (someone who likes the use of guns in sex), Lancelyn is terrified of women, Jaimie has committed murder in order to understand what it is like to be evil, Ferdie is a conjuror with bad breath, Bernard is an expert on ghost stories, Mortimer is a thug who works at the The Times Literary Supplement. But Tom is just so ordinary (apart from his visions of Fairyland). Hovering in the background are the ghostly presences of St Ignatius of Loyola, St Joseph of Copertino, Robert Louis Stevenson and M.R. James. Tom's Version is a lament for the sixties and then a mad race towards old age and death.

'The first novel from, the renowned storyteller Hugh Lupton opens with a scene that could be straight out of Thomas Hardy... A helpless observer of the damage that enclosure is doing to his beloved landscape and the people who live there, a young man torn between romantic love for his muse, Mary Joyce, and the consequences of a moment's folly with a woman named Betsy Jackson, Clare comes to see that ' the bright world has begun, one by one, to break its promises.' Yet, while the immediate causes of his grief and disillusionment are personal, they are always intricately linked to what is happening to the land - and it is to Lupton's great credit that, in this engaging and lyrical novel, he brings this relationship between emotional and psychological life and the environment into play at every turn. This vision transforms a bittersweet love story that takes place 'seven generations ago' into a study of the politics of land use, revealing the true nature of British agriculture as systematic exploitation of land and people whose tragic consequences Lupton notes in an afterward, 'we are reaping the full harvest of today.' John Burnside in The Times

Brought up as a servant in the austere household of an uncle, Marianna is now a woman of property. But at thirty, she knows little of life. For others in the town of Nuoro and its surrounding hill farms, Sardinia is a harsh and unforgiving place. When she meets a former companion in service, now forced into banditry to support his family, her calm existence is turned upside down. The defining moment of her life has come. Does Marianna love for Simone Sole triumph over her common sense, social convention and what is expected of her by her family? Grazia Deledda explores the layers of temptation and doubt in a novel of Sardinian life coloured with her own intimate knowledge of its beauties and dangers.

The Victor is the fourth book in the four-part series Song of the Eye Stone. Set in a fantastical world, it is an epic saga of friendship, longing and the things that really matter in life. Exhausted from death-defying adventures and devastating loss, Miranda and Syrsa must gather the strength to go in search of the legendary eye stone one last time. Only they can destroy it and free the Queendom from its tyrannical curse once and for all. But there is no time to lose, for they are not the only ones who seek it. Miranda and Syrsa's final journey takes them to the spectacular Queen's City, where rainbow pearls glitter in the streets. But it soon becomes clear that the Queen knows more about them than she would have them believe. What does the Queen want with them? Can they trust her? And what is her connection with the evil Iberis?

A young man plunges into student life, in flight from an overbearing father, in search of an identity of his own making. He is like everyone else in his quest for a future he cannot yet understand. His experiences, often comic, always innocently human, are an exploration of the concept of boundaries. But in choosing to study in Trieste, a city of many-layered histories and ethnicities, a city of brilliant sunshine and ferocious gales, he finds that life, and love, throw him more questions than answers. It is a tale of Everyman, but more than that: in the hands of Diego Marani, author of the celebrated New Finnish Grammar, this wry and affecting novel leads the reader on a nostalgic and thought-provoking journey made wholly individual by its evocation of place - the celestial city of Trieste. 'I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, one can fall in love with them and never forget them.'

Ismael, a successful novelist, has been suffering from writer's block for two years, trying to get inside his female narrator's head and failing. However, he tells no one about this problem and continues to spend each day in his study, supposedly writing. When his mother is taken into hospital, he is forced to spend time with his father who has the beginnings of dementia. This experience carries him back to a moment in his childhood that has remained hidden away in his memory until then. Jasone, Ismael's wife, has always been his first reader and editor. As a student, she used to write, but has devoted the last decade of her life to her daughters and to her husband's career. Now that the girls have left home, Jasone finds herself drawn to ideas and causes she believed were the domain of her best friend Libe, as well as to an old flame, who is also her husband's publisher. The rape of a young woman in a nearby town triggers something in Jasone, and she begins spending her nights at her computer writing a novel she never expected to write. When the couple's respective secrets are revealed, everything will change. With intelligence and wisdom, Karmele Jaio brilliantly dissects the complexities of relationships of all kinds, never coming down on one side, but allowing her characters space to evolve and take up roles of their own making.

The Scaler of Peaks is the third book in the four-part series Song of the Eye Stone. Set in a fantastical world, it is an epic saga of friendship, longing and the things that really matter in life. Iberis has destroyed the northern port town. Miranda, Syrsa and Lydia have set out on a quest to find the eye stone - the source of Iberis' power - and destroy it. Together they must scale inhospitable peaks, battle the cold, and navigate the strange ways of the mountain folk in order to journey deep into the mountains, where the eye stone is being held. But they have no idea what dangers lie in store for them...

The ancient traditions of Sardinia feature heavily in this early collection. The stories collected in The Queen of Darkness, published in 1902 shortly after Deledda's marriage and move to Rome, reflect her transformation from little-known regional writer to an increasingly fêted and successful mainstream author. The two miniature psycho-dramas that open the collection are followed by stories of Sardinian life in the remote hills around her home town of Nuoro. The stark but beautiful countryside is a backdrop to the passions, misadventures and injustices which shape the lives of its rugged but all too human inhabitants.

A native of Sardinia, Grazia Deledda's novels are mostly set in the rugged hills around her home town of Nuoro. Her characters reflect the difficult lives of people still constrained by ancient customs and practices. Her voice is powerful, her tone often sombre. But her wide-ranging talent had a sunnier side, revealed in many of her later works. The Christmas Present, first published in 1930, brings together a collection of folk tales, children's stories and personal reminiscences that portray with humour and affection the lighter side of Sardinian life. This is a book that will charm and delight, opening a window on to the Sardinia of old and the formative influences on a Nobel laureate.

'The overall effect is like a brilliantly well-informed 200-year history of philosophy, science, music and mysticism, touched with an edge of Da Vinci Code hocus pocus, in the sense of an alternative "sub rosa" world history never quite revealed. To say so, though, is to miss the sheer fun and narrative energy of Crumey's writing, the skill and insight with which he conjures up each of his narrators from the repellent to the poignant, and the huge ingenuity with which he interweaves their stories, including that of Adam Crouch, a failed writer and memorably seedy 21st century buffoon, who enters the story by accident, and becomes its final boozed-up witness to timeless tragedy. There's something profoundly post-modern about the dense cultural references, and the complex patchwork of fact and fiction, that make up Crumey's narrative; and in that sense it continues in a vein he has been mining for the last 25 years and more. The intensity with which the story questions the very nature of time, though - and follows its central voice, Robert Coyle, through the strange reality-shifting nightmare of the pandemic - seems entirely of this moment; as if Crumey were leading us into a terminal vortex of history and thought, music and culture, parallel universes and competing realities, where all things sparkle and implode with extraordinary vividness, on the edge of oblivion.' Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman

The entry in Dante Alighieri's diary for April 22nd 1980 reads: What do publishers do, who do not do their own repping, distribution, publicity and writing? I can't help wondering? For instance, if it is a bit quiet on the sales and distribution front, I turn my attention to the publicity and Mediaville. Then there are the accounts' statements to be sent out. When I have some spare time in the evening or on the tube, I write my diary. It is a full and satisfying life. Read on and be enthralled by the Dead Loss Success Story which has more than a passing resemblance to the early days of Dedalus.

"Suspense and foreboding move alongside the chief players in this auspicious novelistic debut by a British writer. Franey deftly engages the reader's emotions as she spins this disturbing tale." Publishers Weekly "It is fortunate for those perpetrators of child abuse that a novelist has at last managed to highlight their trauma in an imaginative and sympathetic light. The cold, stark and unpleasant facts of child abuse usually come to us from newspapers and the real skill of Cry Baby is the way the novel explains all the complications which force a person into abusing their own child." Social Work Today

Pat Gray's Kafkaesque fantasy presents a bureaucratic landscape which is both sinister and comic. Mr Narrator leads an obscure neo-colonial existence in Goughly, where he is an export agent for a firm of Rotherham engineers and shares a flat and a mistress with Murphy, a post-modernist writer. An upset to one of his business deals plunges him into a bizarre cross-desert journey to the capital, where, social, political and sexual humiliation descend on him in ever increasing number. Pat Gray's novel portrays with documentary accuracy a Morocco which has never existed but one which has now been colonised by surrealism

Edo's Souls is a compelling, multi-generational epic that sees the three main characters trapped in a nation gripped by the terrors of civil war, forcing each one to confront their past selves, and to resolve what is most important to them - love, family, or country. When a young Lucy-Eghino, who is coming of age in a 1970s village in southern Sudan, is beset by rumours of approaching violence, she has no choice but to flee - first to Juba, then northwards to Khartoum. Marco, a gentle young father, wages a daily battle to keep his family together while avoiding friction with any northerners. Peter, a soldier unsure of where his loyalties lie, is forced to carry out night raids searching for bands of rebels.

This volume brings together six unique female voices: Magdalena Blazevic, Tatjana Gromaca, Vesna Peric, Natali Spasova, Sonja Zivaljevic and Ana Svetel from six countries that were part of Yugoslavia until the early 1990s. Elements of a common history shine through in this smorgasbord of classic short stories, travel writing, diarylike accounts and stand-alone chapters from a hard-hitting novel. Despite the intervening wars and crises, the six republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia are 'reunited' - albeit briefly - in this collection.

This is the final part of Huysmans' alter ego Durtal's spiritual journey. From the satanism of La-Ba (1891) he makes his way to the foot of the cross by a retreat in a Trappist monastery in En Route (1895), and by living in Chartres in The Cathedral(1898) until finally he embraces Roman Catholicism in The Oblate (1903). Durtal is a modern anti-hero: solitary, agonised and alienated. His spiritual Journey confronts the problems of our age. Art, architecture and music light Durtal's path to God. Although a novel about spiritual redemption The Oblate is rich in the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle decadence which has dominated Huymans' previous novels.