Pushkin Press Classics – serie

'One of the best historical novels by anyone, ever' David Mitchell

'Japan's greatest twentieth-century author' Graham Greene

'A masterpiece. There can be no higher praise' Daily Telegraph

With an introduction by Martin Scorsese.

Jesuit priest Sebastian Rodrigues sets sail for Japan in 1640, full of idealistic fire. But the cold land he arrives in has no place for missionaries: the Tokugawa shogunate has banned Christianity, and believers face torture and execution. Living in hiding, leading worship in secret, Rodrigues begins to question the true meaning of compassion - and the limits of his own belief.

This stunning work of historical fiction - introduced by Martin Scorsese, who adapted it into a film - is one of literature's deepest explorations of doubt, fellowship, and enduring faith.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by William Johnston.

Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) was one of the greatest novelists of postwar Japan. Baptised as a Roman Catholic as a child, his work explores the relationship between East and West from his unique perspective as a Japanese Christian. Endo won the Akutagawa Prize and the Yomiuri Literary Prize, was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, and received an Order of Culture from the Japanese government. Among his other novels are Deep River, The Samurai and The Sea and Poison, all published by Pushkin Press.

William Johnston (1925-2010) was born in Belfast. He entered the Jesuit priesthood and was sent to their mission in Japan in 1951. He would spend most of the rest of his life there, teaching English at Tokyo's Sophia University, writing on mysticism, and practising aspects of both Catholicism and Zen Buddhism.

'One hardly knows where to begin in praising Zweig's work' - Ali Smith

'The Updike of his day... Zweig is a lucid writer, and Bell renders his prose flawlessly' - New York Observer

Perfectly paced and brimming with passion - twenty-two tales from a master storyteller of the twentieth century

Translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, and spanning a prolific literary career, these stories form a map of the human soul, drawn by a writer both tender and perceptive.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Anthea Bell.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, Zweig left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York - a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

Anthea Bell (1936-2018) ranked among the leading literary translators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work from German, French and Danish into English encompassed the writings of Kafka, Freud, E.T.A. Hoffmann, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Georges Simenon, W.G. Sebald, René Goscinny, Cornelia Funke and many others. Her translations for Pushkin Press of Stefan Zweig have reintroduced to English-language readers the work of one of the most popular European authors of the interwar period. She won numerous literary awards, some of them several times, and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.

'A strange and compelling classic of dystopian and climate fiction, one that with foreboding and deep compassion maps the psyche and the terrain of dislocation' - Jeff VanderMeer

'One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future' - New Yorker

Ice will soon cover the entire globe. As the glacial tide creeps forward, society breaks down. Hurtling through the frozen chaos is a nameless narrator, seeking the white-haired girl he once loved, desperate to rescue her - or perhaps to annihilate her. Through nightmarish, ever-shifting scenes, she flees him and his powerful enemy, the Warden. But none of them can outrun the ice.

Anna Kavan's masterwork is an apocalyptic vision of environmental devastation and possessive violence, rendered in unforgettable, propulsive, hallucinatory prose.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

With an introduction by Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige and The Inverted World.

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was born Helen Woods, the only child of wealthy British expatriates, and grew up travelling through Europe and America. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson, having left her husband in Burma and returned with her son to live in England. After a mental breakdown in the 1930s she began writing under a new name, taken from one of her characters, and with a new style. She continued writing for another three decades, while frequently using heroin and undergoing several rounds of psychiatric hospitalisation. She died shortly after the publication of Ice, her most celebrated work.

'A revolutionary thriller, bildungsroman and cry of feminist frustration... Actual-work-of-genius territory' Sunday Times

A captivating feminist classic about a woman's struggle for independence in fascist Italy, from the author of Forbidden Notebook - with an afterword by Elena Ferrante

Alessandra has always wanted more than life offered her. Growing up in a crowded apartment block in 1930s Rome, she watches as her mother's dreams of becoming a concert pianist are stifled by marriage. When her father's traditional family try to make Alessandra marry at a young age, she rebels against the future they imagine for her.

Soon she falls passionately in love with Francesco, an anti-fascist professor, and a new world seems to open up. Working for the underground resistance, she tastes the independence that she has yearned for. What will it take for her to break free from society's expectations, and live on her own terms?

Drawing on Alba de Céspedes's own experiences during Italy's wartime uprising, Her Side of the Story is a feminist chronicle of fierce and unforgettable power.

'One of the undisputed classics of contemporary European literature' Independent

'A monumental writer' Sunday Telegraph

A stunning fresh translation of one of the most powerful stories of desire and undoing in modern literature

Erudite, respectable writer Gustav Aschenbach lives a life of structured routine. One day, as he puzzles over his stubborn writer's block, Aschenbach has a dazzling vision that leaves him with a restless urge to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice.

On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural beauty: Tadzio. As he lingers on at the hotel, Aschenbach falls into an ever-deeper infatuation with the youth, whose curled blond hair and porcelain face fill him with rapture. Ignoring whispered warnings of a cholera outbreak in the city, Aschenbach chooses to stay close to Tadzio, his mind swirling with mad desire.

Classical in structure yet roiled by disturbing passion, Death in Venice is an enormously powerful story of one man's undoing.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand picked from around the globe.

Translated by Lesley Chamberlain

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was perhaps Germany's most famous twentieth-century writer. Born to a merchant family in Lübeck, Mann was preparing to enter the family business when his father suddenly died and the business was liquidated. The Manns moved to Munich, where Mann began his literary career with the epic novel Buddenbrooks (1901), which was a huge success. Further novels and stories followed, including Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924); five years following publication of the latter novel, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. When Hitler came to power, Mann fled to Switzerland, and from there he escaped to California at the outbreak of the Second World War. He is buried in Switzerland, where he spent his final years.

'One of the great novels of the past half century' GARTH GREENWELL

A rediscovered queer classic: the subversive, blazingly beautiful oddball romance between an ageing trans woman and a young revolutionary by a Latin American icon

It is spring 1986 and Santiago's streets are aflame with protests against the dictator Augusto Pinochet. From her lavishly decorated hovel, the Queen of the Corner embroiders linen for the wealthy, dreams of romance and listens to boleros to drown out the rioting and gunshots. When handsome young macho Carlos waltzes into her life, the ageing queer swiftly agrees to help with his clandestine activities. As a strange connection blooms, their fates careen towards that of the dictator himself.

Written in lushly imaginative prose that blends the sordid and the profound, the romantic and the militant, My Tender Matador is a transgressive queer classic of desire and revolution.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Katherine Silver.

Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) is considered one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America and was also an activist and a performance artist. Born in Santiago, Chile, he became a renowned voice of Latin American counterculture during the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath. He received Chile's José Donoso Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is best known for his crónicas, a selection of which was published by Pushkin as A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, and one novel, My Tender Matador, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was adapted in 2020 into a critically acclaimed film by Chilean director Rodrigo Sepúlveda.

Katherine Silver's most recent translations include works by María Sonia Cristoff, César Aira, Verónica Zondek, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Julio Ramón Ribeyro. She is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC), and the author of Echo Under Story.

'Scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark' Jeff VanderMeer

'Exuberant, funny, crackling with invention' The Times

A colour-drenched, fantasy-tinged epic tale.

One stormswept afternoon, after twenty-one years of being dead, Dewi Ayu rises from her grave to avenge a curse placed on her family. Amidst the orange groves and starfruit trees, her children and grandchildren have been living out lives of madness, incest, murder and heartbreak. They are creatures of breathtaking beauty - all but one of them, whose ugliness is unparalleled.

And Beauty is her name.

Beauty Is a Wound is a bawdy, epic tale of fearsome women and weak-willed men, communist ghosts and chaste princesses. In this satirical portrait of Indonesia's painful past, Kurniawan weaves together history with local legend to spin a fantastical masterpiece in which darkness and light dance hand in hand.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Annie Tucker

Eka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia in 1975. He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta and has since published several novels and short stories. The rights to Beauty is a Wound have now been sold in 27 territories. Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is also available from Pushkin Press.

'Her writing is magnificent' Telegraph

'A testament of remarkable, if feverish beauty' Guardian

In an unhappy suburban household, a young girl begins to retreat into a nighttime world of her own imagining. As her daytime life deteriorates, she decides to take up permanent residence in the house of sleep, where rooms change position and dream-tigers prowl. But there are institutions determined to control her. Will they stop her coming home to the dark forever?

A kaleidoscopic autobiographical narrative, written in the language of childhood dreams once known to us all, this is a work of devastating loneliness and stunning imaginative freedom.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was born Helen Woods, the only child of wealthy British expatriates, and grew up travelling through Europe and America. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson, having left her husband in Burma and returned with her son to live in England. After a mental breakdown in the 1930s she began writing under a new name, taken from one of her characters, and with a new style. She continued writing for another three decades, while frequently using heroin and undergoing several rounds of psychiatric hospitalisation. She died shortly after the publication of Ice, her most celebrated work, also published by Pushkin Press.

'Her range is as broad as her prose is buoyant' New Statesman

A collection of Teffi's best autobiographical non-fiction writings

Ranging from portraits of Rasputin and Lenin to observations on the Russian Revolution, and from profiles of cultural figures to moving domestic scenes, this short collection includes writings by the inimitable Teffi never before published in English. Everything is here - politics, society, art and literature, love and family life - and all is told in Teffi's multifaceted style: amusing, sincerely moving, ironic and always honest, pervaded by an intensely felt understanding of humanity's simultaneous tragedy and absurdity.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Rose France and Anne Marie Jackson.

Teffi (1872-1952) wrote poems, plays, stories, satires and feuilletons, and was renowned in Russia for her wit and powers of observation. Following her emigration in 1919 she settled in Paris, where she became a leading figure in the émigré literary scene. Now her genius has been rediscovered by a new generation of readers, and she once again enjoys huge acclaim in Russia and across the world. Her short-story collection Subtly Worded and her memoir Memories - From Moscow to the Black Sea are also published by Pushkin Press.

BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

'Wonderfully idiosyncratic, coolly heartfelt and memorable' William Boyd

'One of the great writers of early 20th Century Russia' Simon Sebag Montefiore

'A remarkable memoir . . . both potent and endearing' Erica Wagner, New Statesman

The writer and satirist Teffi was a literary sensation in Russia until war and revolution forced her to leave her country forever. Memories is her blackly funny and heartbreaking account of her final, frantic journey into exile across Russia - travelling by cart, freight train and rickety steamer - and the 'ordinary and unheroic' people she encounters. From refugees setting up camp on a dockside to a singer desperately buying a few 'last scraps' of fabric to make a dress, all are caught up in the whirlwind; all are immortalised by Teffi's penetrating gaze.

Fusing exuberant wit and bitter horror, this is an extraordinary portrayal of what it means to say goodbye, with haunting relevance in today's new age of diaspora. Published in English for the first time, it confirms the rediscovery of Teffi as one of the most humane, perceptive observers of her times, and an essential writer for ours.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg.

Teffi (1872-1952) wrote poems, plays, stories, satires and feuilletons, and was renowned in Russia for her wit and powers of observation. Following her emigration in 1919 she settled in Paris, where she became a leading figure in the émigré literary scene. Now her genius has been rediscovered by a new generation of readers, and she once again enjoys huge acclaim in Russia and across the world. Among other selections from her work, Pushkin Press publishes Subtly Worded, a collection of her short stories, and Rasputin and Other Ironies, which includes her best non-fiction.

'Stefan Zweig cherished the everyday imperfections and frustrated aspirations of the men and women he analysed with such affection and understanding' Paul Bailey, TLS

The classic biography of the tragic queen

From the moment of her birth to her death on the scaffold, Mary Stuart spent her life embroiled in power struggles that shook the foundations of Renaissance Europe. Revered by some as the rightful Queen of England, reviled by others as a murderous adulteress, her long and fascinating rivalry with her cousin Elizabeth I led ultimately to her downfall.

This classic biography, by one of the most popular writers of the twentieth century, breathes life into the character of one of history's most remarkable women, and turns her tale into a story of passion and plotting as gripping as any novel.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.

New paperback of the acclaimed, sharply immediate diary written from the heart of Occupied Paris by a classic German writer

'Delicately drawn, inventive and unmistakably Parisian' Financial Times

The writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observations of life from the midst of catastrophe that, with their evocative power and precision, would make a permanent place for him in German letters.

Posted to Paris in 1940 to conduct archival research, Hartlaub recorded his impressions of the unfamiliar city in notebooks that document with unparalleled immediacy the daily realities of occupation. With a painter's eye for detail, Hartlaub writes of the bustle of civilians and soldiers in cafés, of half-seen trysts during blackout hours and the sublime light of Paris in spring. Clouds Over Paris is a unique testament to the persistence of ordinary life through disaster.

An engrossing, monumental epic of German-Jewish life in Berlin over four generations - a landmark book in English for the first time

'A wonderfully vivid social portrait of pre-Nazi Berlin' - Guardian

'Has an addictive immediacy that will make you reluctant to put it down' - New York Times

Germany, 1878: young brothers Paul and Karl Effinger leave the German provinces to seek their fortune in Berlin. Ambitious and talented, they soon establish themselves as entrepreneurs and marry the daughters of high-society families. A flourishing horizon opens before them, but the Great War and the youthful rebellion of the 1920s lay waste to bourgeois certainties, and, as the generations pass, a rising antisemitism begins to shadow their bright world.

With dazzling historical sweep, Gabriele Tergit tells of the family's changing fortunes within the vibrantly evoked, ever-changing metropolis of Berlin. Full of parties, drama and the most delicious gossip, The Effingers is a vibrant, monumental portrait of Germany's Jewish life, in all its richness and complexity.

A revelatory volume of two of the twentieth century's great poetic innovators, Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov, in vibrant new translations by Robert Chandler

Guillaume Apollinaire and Velimir Khlebnikov never met, but they have much in common. Both inventive luminaries of Modernism, they played a central role in the avant-garde movements of their time and worked closely with the most important visual artists around them. Written with exhilarating freedom and creativity, their verse has continued to inspire poets to the present day.

Acclaimed translator and poet Robert Chandler offers a unique selection from both poets' work in vivid new translations. Showcasing their most direct, heartfelt verse alongside their form-breaking innovations, this volume reveals the deep insight with which these two poets wrote about love, friendship, art, revolution, famine and war.

'I owe Betz infinite gratitude...a first-rate poet, a creative spirit, and a friend to all creative spirits...an ornament to literary France...an artist with words, lovable and worthy of love' - Thomas Mann

'Maurice Betz is one of those artists whose importance only fully appears after they have disappeared' - Marcel Aymé

Walking in the Luxembourg Garden, describing encounters with enigmatic diva Eleonora Duse or an irascible Tolstoy: Rainer Maria Rilke's French translator Maurice Betz enjoyed a rare intimacy with the great poet. This account of their collaborative translation of Rilke's only novel brings the reader along on a tour of the glittering cultural scene of interwar Paris.

An elegant, poignant look at the great writer's final years, Betz's memoir, sensitively translated by Will Stone, is a portrait of genius, an evocation of a lost world, and a testament to enduring friendship.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Will Stone.

Maurice Betz (1898-1946), as well as writing poetry and novels, was a prolific translator of Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann. He worked closely with Rilke on the French translations of his works while Rilke was alive, and continued translating the poet into French in the decades following his death. He fought in both World Wars and was made a prisoner in the Second. Shortly after the war, he was found dead in a hotel room in Tours, having asked for an early wake-up call.

Will Stone is a poet, essayist and literary translator of French, Franco-Belgian and German literature. His previous translations include Rilke in Paris, also by Maurice Betz, several works by Stefan Zweig, and poems by Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke, all available from Pushkin Press.

'This extremely beautiful novel has a ripeness and wisdom all too rare in modern literature' Telegraph

'There's a certain time in life when one needs to read Hesse' Jenny Erpenbeck

With an introduction by Graham Coxon

In a monastery in medieval Germany, brilliant, analytical monk Narcissus is drawn to his new student, the impulsive, charismatic Goldmund. Despite their differences in age and temperament, the two form a deep friendship, but when Goldmund rejects the monastic life and runs away to seek experience of the wider world, their bond is tested, in this plangent, limpid masterpiece, rich with the rhythms of medieval life.

Goldmund pursues a sensual, picaresque existence, and Narcissus remains cloistered and controlled, but events and inclination bring them together again and again. One of literature's most moving portraits of friendship, Narcissus and Goldmund is also a powerful invitation to the reader: to explore the agony and ecstasy of life in the world, to seek the solace of contemplation, and to find the deep unity that exists within all of life's apparent contradictions.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Leila Vennewitz.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was born in was born in Württemberg, Germany. He resented his pious and repressive upbringing, and was determined to be 'a writer or nothing else'. His writing was greatly influenced by his travels to Asia and his friendship with psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In 1946 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Several of his novels are published by Pushkin Press Classics, including The Journey from the East, Demian and Siddhartha.

Leila Vennewitz (1912-2007) was a British-Canadian translator of German literature, known for her translations of works by Heinrich Böll and Alfred Andersch, among other authors.

'Admirable' New York Times Book Review

'One of the world's most distinguished scholars of de Sade' Independent

The Marquis de Sade, infamous for his obscene writing and sexual cruelty, was incongruously married to a pious wife. A wife who, despite his peccadilloes, loved him devotedly for thirty years, through betrayal, imprisonment, and national turmoil.

Bearing his children, editing his manuscripts, visiting him in prison, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil endured her chaotic marriage with grace, achieving independence in an era when women were entitled to none. Their complex relationship, set against the French Revolution and its aftermath, is brought to life with humour and compassion by Margaret Crosland, the translator of Sade's Gothic Tales.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Margaret Crosland (1920-2017), born in Shropshire, translated works by the Marquis de Sade, Émile Zola, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir and Cesare Pavese, among others, as well as writing many biographies and works of literary criticism. She was a leading authority on the life and work of the Marquis de Sade. Her prolific writings and translations were sometimes published under the pen name Leonard de Saint-Yves.

A heady, rapturous novel of love and self-discovery in the south of France written by famed publisher Helen Wolff, based on her early life with Kurt Wolff

In a giddy rush, a young woman and her older lover escape the rising fascism of 1930s Berlin for a summer vacation on the Côte d'Azur. As they drive along stunning bays and linger over sumptuous meals, they are enchanted by each other. But their harmony soon falters, and the woman decides she must leave in search of a cottage of her own near Saint-Tropez. There, amid the vineyards and lemon trees, she will forge startling new connections and pass an unforgettable summer of independence and freedom.

Background for Love is an autobiographical novel by the great publisher Helen Wolff, who together with her husband, Kurt Wolff, set up Pantheon Books in America after fleeing Nazi Germany. In the fascinating companion essay, historian Marion Detjen, the author's great-niece, delves into the basis of the novel in Helen's own life as well as the political and social forces that led her to abandon hope of publishing it.

Written in 1932 and now translated into English for the first time by the author's grandson, Tristram Wolff, this is a lushly atmospheric, irresistible story of passion and self-discovery, told from the cusp of disaster.

'One of my favourite books by one of my favourite Argentinian authors' Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

'Diamantine, intense and violent' Times Literary Supplement

Dazzling and hallucinatory, the stories in this collection recall the masters of magical realism - but with Sara Gallardo's distinctive slant. An old man wakes up one morning to find that his beloved garden is floating away, with him on board. A young woman moves to Buenos Aires, bringing with her a replacement head. A meek German missionary leaves Paraguay for the Pampas, unprepared for what he will discover there.

Resplendent with otherworldly imagery and beguiling prose, Land of Smoke presents a uniquely compelling voice in Latin American literature.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Jessica Sequeira

Sara Gallardo was a celebrated and prize-winning Argentinian writer, born in Buenos Aires in 1931. Her first book was published in 1958, and by the time she died in 1988, she had published novels, short stories, children's books, and essays. Written after the death of her second husband, Land of Smoke is the first of her books to be translated into English.

'An extraordinary book... Part Gothic fantasy, part emblematic progress through a dream world... It has a gripping hallucinogenic clarity' - Snoo Wilson

A trancelike feminist fable by Britain's foremost surrealist painter

Calcination. Putrefaction. Exaltation. Trapped on an enchanted island ruled by her uncle, a young woman must pass through the stages of alchemical transformation to escape. He wants to conquer death by magic - and she may pay the price for his ambition.

Lushly visual, rife with symbols and cries from the unconscious, Colquhoun's first novel is a surreal feminist fable, and a supreme artistic vision.

Includes 'Hexentanz', a lost chapter from the original manuscript.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

With a new introduction by Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side: A Journey Into Women, Art and the Spirit World.

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as her novel Goose of Hermogenes, she is the author of two travelogues, The Living Stones: Cornwall and The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

'A triumph of the poetic intelligence: a masterpiece' New Statesman

'So shrewd, so ruthless, glittering and clever... every page he wrote was a delight' Fay Weldon

In this novel of desire and perdition, a bored and precocious adolescent pursues the wife of a soldier fighting in the First World War. At first attracted to Marthe out of sheer aimlessness, he finds himself falling in love. Consumed by sensual pleasure and power games, the pair do nothing to disguise their affair - until the consequences of their heedlessness begin to unfold.

This shockingly sexy novel rocketed its teenage author into overnight fame in the 1920s - and was all the more scandalous for being based on his life.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Christopher Moncrieff.

Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923) entered Parisian literary society with a bang when The Devil in the Flesh was published. Only eighteen at the time, he became the star of an unprecedented publicity campaign and earned copious praise and censure for his precocious talent and scandalous behaviour - the more so as the novel was based on his own wartime affair with a soldier's wife. A protégé and perhaps lover of Jean Cocteau, he fraternized with artists, dancers and aristocrats, drank heavily, and generally ran riot, before settling down for a brief period, during which he wrote one more novel, Count d'Orgel, also published by Pushkin Press. Shortly after the manuscript was completed, he contracted typhoid fever and died within a few weeks, aged only twenty. He is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Christopher Moncrieff is a poet, linguist and literary translator from French, German and Romanian. As well as a writing career he has served in the military and produced son et lumière spectacles. He is descended from the poet Robert Burns.

'A magnificent comic novel' TLS

An exuberant farce from a treasure of world literature.

At the country estate of kindly Colonel Rostanev, parasitic houseguest Foma Opiskin has brought everyone under his sway. Now Opiskin plans to marry off his host to a wealthy widow. Will the Colonel give way to Opiskin's bullying and sacrifice the love of his life, Nastasya? Or will he finally resist the petty tyrant's demands?

Farcical and effervescent with absurdity, this short novel is a sparkling example of Dostoyevsky's comic side - and a microcosmic portrait of Russia on the verge of upheaval and transformation.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Ignat Avsey.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) trained as an engineer and began his literary career with translations. As punishment for engaging in pro­gressive political discussion, he was subjected to a mock execution and sent into exile in Siberia in his twenties. Subsequently he worked exclu­sively as a writer, touring Europe and publishing novels and journalism. Addicted to gambling, he was often near starvation. His second, very happy marriage to typist Anna Snitkina helped to stabilize his manner of living, and with her practical assistance he went on to write several masterpieces of psychological and existential fiction. Novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground have earned him a lasting reputation as one of the dominant figures of world literature.

Ignat Avsey (1938-2013) was born in Latvia to Russian parents, who relocated the family to Britain after the Second World War. He taught Russian language and literature at the University of Westminster. He translated several other works by Dostoyevsky, including The Karamazov Brothers and The Idiot, as well as Alexander Lernet-Holenia's novel I Was Jack Mortimer, also published by Pushkin Press.

'Unsurpassable' Elena Ferrante

'Timeless' John Banville

Young Arturo grows up in isolated freedom on an island in the Bay of Naples, roaming the hills with his dog, sailing and reading tales of mythical heroes.

This idyll is shattered when his father returns home with a new wife, Nunziata. Barely older than Arturo, one of the only women he has ever met, she awakens his fierce longing for tenderness, a longing which draws the family towards a painful reckoning in this powerful story of disillusionment and desire.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Ann Goldstein.

Elsa Morante (1912-1985) was an Italian novelist, short-story writer and poet. Born and raised in Rome, she started writing at a young age, initially publishing short stories in children's journals. Married to the writer Alberto Moravia, she spent much of the Second World War in hiding with him, both having much to fear from the Fascists due to their Jewish heritage and the social and sexual themes explored in their writing. Her first novel, House of Liars, was published in 1948 and won the Viareggio Prize. Arturo's Island, published in 1957, made her the first woman to win the Strega Prize, and in 1974 her novel History became a record-breaking bestseller and confirmed her reputation as one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Italy.

Ann Goldstein is a former New Yorker editor and has won prizes and accolades for her translations of Primo Levi and Elena Ferrante.