Written in Persian, The Blind Owl is predominantly a love story – an unconventional love story that elicits visions and nightmare reveries from the depths of the reader’s subconscious. A young man, an old man and a beautiful young girl perform, as if framed within a Persian miniature, a ritual of de…
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This collection of Pushkin’s stories begins with ‘The Queen of Spades’, perhaps the most celebrated short story in Russian literature. The young Hermann, while watching some friends gambling, hears a rumour of how an officer’s grandmother is always able to predict the three winning cards in a game….
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Set during the Pugachov rebellion against Catherine the Great, The Captain’s Daughter was Pushkin’s only completed novel and remains one of his most popular works. The inexperienced and impetuous young nobleman Pyotr Grinyev is sent on military service to a remote fortress, where he falls in love wi…
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In his immense oeuvre, sampled here in a sizeable and varied selection of the best poems, people from every course and manner of life have their say – housewives, mothers, beggars, lovers, businessmen, popes, whores, doctors, thieves, lawyers, priests, pen-pushers, actresses, gossips and many more….
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Spring Awakening is set in a small German town in the 1890s where adolescent boys and girls grope their way towards knowledge and maturity against the blocks set up by parents and teachers in the name of “morality”. Melchior, fearless in his pursuit of the truth, manages to retain his freedom of spi…
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Available for the first time in an English translation, this selection gives non-Francophone readers the chance to encounter the many incarnations of renowned Belgian painter René Magritte – the artist, the man, the aspiring noirist, the fire-breathing theorist – in his own words. Through whimsical…
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By Georg Kaiser
These five plays provide an excellent introduction to Kaiser’s vision of the regeneration of man, which he illustrated in his works by a total paring down of detail, penetrating to the core of the matter and revealing man’s true potential. In From Morning to Midnight the cashier, downtrodden victim…
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Simplicius Simplicissimus – the towering achievement of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, one of the earliest novelists in the German language – charts the adventures of its hero, Simplicius, through the horrors of battle, murder, fire and famine, offering an invaluable eyewitness account of the Thirty Yea…
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