Alma Classics - Böcker

Hadji Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Caucasian struggle against the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling imam, Shamil. Hoping to protect his family, he joins the Russians, who a...

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Considered one of the most influential authors of twentieth century Russian Literature, Ivan Bunin's "Dark Avenues" is the culmination of a life's work which unrelentingly questioned of the political doxa whilst taking his poetic mastery...

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The mayor and local officials of a small provincial town in Russia have got it made: corruption is rife and they have all the power. Yet, when they learn that an undercover government inspector is about to make a visit, they face a mad dash to cov...

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Four sailors discover a copper cylinder containing a manuscript written by the adventurer Adam More, who was shipwrecked in the southern hemisphere. They read its contents out to one another, and the incredible story unfolds of his journey to a lo...

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Celine's third novel, first published in 1944 but dealing with events taking place during the First World War, Guignol's Band follows the narrator's meanderings through London after he has been demobilized due to a war injury. The result is a fran...

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Stevenson published this collection of his early fiction in 1882, after the pieces had appeared in various magazines. The first half features two popular detective-story cycles, The Suicide Club and The Rajahs Diamonds, which deal with a macabre s...

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John Wells, who translated Beaumarchais' plays, introduces the opera with a high-spirited account of the action-packed career of the author, in many respects the prototype of Figaro himself. Basil Deane explores the score: he shows that Mozart's c...

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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 m...

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Portraying the characters and events of a small Midwestern town at the end of the nineteenth century, Winesburg, Ohio is a chronological cycle of stories which reads like an episodic novel. Centring on George Willard, a young local reporter with b...

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Charles Dickens wrote a number of supernatural and horror stories, some of which were included in his longer works, while others were published in magazines. This collection provides an invaluable insight into the author's storytelling appren...

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A remarkable nineteenth-century account of Istanbul which begins with a dazzling description of the city gradually appearing through the fog as the authors ship approaches the harbour Constantinople expertly combines personal anecdote, breathtakin...

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The Village, Ivan Bunin's first full-length novel, is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centring on episodes in the lives of a landowner and his self-educated p...

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"Among the earliest artistic descriptions of the hallucinogenic experience in European literature, the four pieces in this volume document Gautier's and Baudelaire's own involvement in the Club of Assassins, who met under the auspices of Dr M...

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Published posthumously in 1930, Stendhal's travel notes on his 1838 journey to southern France contain descriptions of cities such as Bordeaux, Toulouse and Marseilles, peppered with numerous personal digressions, anecdotes and cultural musings. B...

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In order to rescue his beloved Lyudmila, who has been abducted by the evil wizard Chernomor, the warrior Ruslan faces an epic and perilous quest, encoutering a multitude of fantastic and terrifying characters along the way. The basis for Glinka&ap...

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A collection of early short stories which helped make Fitzgerald's name, Tales of the Jazz Age combines period pieces - the most notable of which is the novella-length 'May Day' - with more fanciful creations, such as the fantastical 'The Curious ...

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Set in Paris during the years of the Reign of Terror, 'The Gods Want Blood' centres on the rise to power of Jacobin sympathizer Evariste Gamelin, a young painter who becomes a juror on a local Revolutionary tribunal. Caught up in the blo...

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In addition to a sparkling modern translation of Praise of Folly, this volume also includes other works by Erasmus: Pope Julius Barred from Heaven, Epigram against Pope Julius II and a selection of his Adages. Together with the extensive annotatio...

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Turgenevs final novel, Virgin Soil traces the destinies of several middle-class revolutionaries who seek to go to the people by working on the land and instilling democratic ideas in the countrysides locals. They include the daydreaming impoverish...

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Micromegas is a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old, thirty-nine-kilometre-high giant from the planet Sirius who can speak a thousand languages and has been expelled from his homeland for writing a heretical tract. On Saturn he befriends the local secr...

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In the Twilight, the third collection of short stories compiled by Anton Chekhov himself, was his first major success and won him the prestigious Pushkin Prize when it was published in 1888. This volume represents a clear milestone in the writers ...

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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century, left only a few other pieces of fiction when he died prematurely at the age of sixty. Childhood Memories and Other Stories...

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After a traumatic early childhood spent living in poverty in a Preston cellar, the suddenly orphaned George Silverman grows up convinced that he is at fault for all the misfortunes in his life. Hoodwinked by hypocritical clergymen and exploited by...

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When Francis Raven is roused from his sleep on the eve of his birthday and confronted by the sight of a woman trying to stab him, he is unsure whether she is real or an apparition. Years later, against the wishes of his mother, he marries Alicia, ...

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On a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating in a mad act of desperation while she practised Beethov...

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Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, one of the collections Arthur Conan Doyle published at the end of his career, anthologizes some of his best short fiction outside of the Sherlock Holmes canon. As well as various tales of escapades in Egypt, Lo...

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As a group of Western tourists travel down the Nile on the steamer Korosko towards the historical sites near Egypts southern border, they are kidnapped by a marauding band of dervishes who demand their conversion to Islam. Cut off from the world, ...

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Mark Twain's gloriously funny Diary of Adam and Eve, which John Updike described as a paradigm of the relations between sexes, is presented here with a number of other Twain pieces on our two oldest ancestors, showing the writer's interest in this...

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This collection of Dante Alighieri's lyrics charts his poetic evolution and displays the ground on which his Vita nuova and Divine Comedy developed. Inspired in his early poems by troubadour love poetry, Dante would later come to master all the ge...

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