Library
Delicious Library
Collection Total:
3,478 Items
Last Updated:
Mar 10, 2024
Tolstoy's Short Fiction (A Norton Critical Edition)
Leo Tolstoy Michael R. KatzLeo Tolstoy’s short works, like his novels, show readers his narrative genius, keen observation, and historical acumen—albeit on a smaller scale. This Norton Critical Edition presents twelve of Tolstoy’s best-known stories, based on the Louise and Aylmer Maude translations (except “Alyosha Gorshok”), which have been revised by the editor for enhanced comprehension and annotated for student readers. The Second Edition newly includes “A Prisoner in the Caucasus,” “Father Sergius,” and “After the Ball,” in addition to Michael Katz’s new translation of “Alyosha Gorshok.” Together these stories represent the best of the author’s short fiction before War and Peace and after Anna Karenina.

“Backgrounds and Sources” includes two Tolstoy memoirs, A History of Yesterday (1851) and The Memoirs of a Madman (1884), as well as entries—expanded in the Second Edition—from Tolstoy’s “Diary for 1855” and selected letters (1858–95) that shed light on the author’s creative process.

“Criticism” collects twenty-three essays by Russian and western scholars, six of which are new to this Second Edition. Interpretations focus both on Tolstoy’s language and art and on specific themes and motifs in individual stories. Contributors include John M. Kopper, Gary Saul Morson, N. G. Chernyshevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Harsha Ram, John Bayley, Vladimir Nabokov, Ruth Rischin, Margaret Ziolkowski, and Donald Barthelme.

A Chronology of Tolstoy’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.
Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd, Anastasia TolstoyA rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy

"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Nabokov famously, and infamously, wrote when introducing his 1973 volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where Strong Opinions left off, presenting Nabokov's public writings from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two last interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature would bring him to teach and write in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe as a recognized literary master. Straddling Russian, French and Anglophone worlds, Nabokov discovers contemporary literature and culture at his own pace and with his own strong dispositions. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov's supreme individuality and his alertness to the details of life past and present illuminate the page and remind us why he has been called the greatest of prose stylists.
Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
Leo Tolstoy
A Confession
Leo Tolstoy"At this time I began to write, from vanity, greed, and pride. In my writings I did exactly as in life. In order to possess the glory and the wealth for whose sake I wrote, it was necessary to conceal the good, and to display the bad. And so I did." Tolstoy's autobiographical essay" "is a dissection of his soul, a study of his life's movement away from the religious certainties of youth, and a vital piece of reading which contextualizes the great works he is best known for. Marking the point at which his life moved from the worldly to the spiritual, Tolstoy's philosophical reassessment of the Orthodox faith is a work that holds vital spiritual and intellectual importance to this very day.
A Confession and Other Religious Writings
Leo Tolstoy, Jane KentishDescribing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. By the time he was fifty, Tolstoy had already written the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was a happy man' and in good health - yet life had lost its meaning. In this poignant confessional fragment, he records a period of his life when he began to turn away from fiction and aesthetics, and to search instead for a practical religion not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth'.
The Cossacks
Leo Tolstoy
The Devil
Leo Tolstoy"I am acting badly," thought Yevgeny, "But what's one to do? Anyhow it is not for long."

Leo Tolstoy is known for epic novels that brilliantly dissect society, but the novella The Devil may be the most personally revealing—and startling—fiction he ever wrote. He thought it so scandalous, in fact, that he hid the manuscript in the upholstery of a chair in his office so his wife wouldn't find it, and he would never allow it to be published in his lifetime.

Perhaps that's because the gripping tale of an aristocratic landowner slowly overcome with unrelenting sexual desire for one of the peasants on his estate was strikingly similar to an affair Tolstoy himself had. Regardless, the tale—presented here with the two separate endings Tolstoy couldn't decide between—is a scintillating study of sexual attraction and human obsession.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
Divine and Human
Leo Tolstoy
Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
The Kreutzer Sonata
Leo TolstoyLove can be surprising. Love can be heartbreaking. Love can be an art. But love is the singular emotion that all humans rely on most . . . and crave endlessly, no matter what the cost. United by this theme of love, the nine titles in the Penguin Great Loves collection include tales of blissful and all-encompassing, doomed and tragic, erotic and absurd, seductive and adulterous, innocent and murderous love. A deeply moving addition to the Penguin Great Ideas and Great Journeys series, each gorgeously packaged book will challenge all expectations of love while celebrating the beauty of its existence.

All books in this series: Cures for Love
Doomed Love
The Eaten Heart
First Love
Forbidden Fruit
The Kreutzer Sonata
A Mere Interlude
Of Mistresses, Tigresses and Other Conquests
The Seducer’s Diary
War and Peace
Leo TolstoyWar and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.

As Napoleon's army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

 

Three-Volume Boxed Set
Collected Shorter Fiction - Volume 1
LEO TOLSTOY
Collected Shorter Fiction - Volume 2
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts
Leo Tolstoy Richard Pevear Larissa Volokhonsky*****