A Russian Gentleman
10 best books like A Russian Gentleman (Sergei Aksakov): The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, Original Letters from India, The Artamonov Business, Farewell to Matyora, Eugene Onegin and Other Poems, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition: A Compendium of Knowledge from the Classical Islamic World, The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island, Tattoo, Enemies of Promise, Government
| Author | Kobayashi Issa |
| ISBN | 1570621446 |
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the...
| Author | Eliza Fay |
| ISBN | 1590173368 |
Eliza Fay’s origins are obscure; she was not beautiful, rich, or outlandishly accomplished. Yet the letters she wrote from her 1779 voyage across the globe captivated E. M. Forster, who arranged for their British publication in 1925. The letters have been delighting readers ever since with their...
| Author | Maxim Gorky |
| ISBN | 0900948248 |
Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, Soviet novelist, playwright & essayist, who was a founder of social realism. Although known principally as a writer, he was closely associated with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. Of all Gorky's novels, The Artamonov...
| Author | Valentin Rasputin |
| ISBN | 0810113295 |
A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress.
It is the final summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village....
| Author | Alexander Pushkin |
| ISBN | 0375406727 |
Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...
| Author | Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri |
| ISBN | 0143107488 |
An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogues everything known to exist from the perspective of a 14th-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and 30 volumes--here abridged to one volume, and translated...
| Author | John McPhee |
| ISBN | 1899863249 |
There was a toast among the clans when they banqueted. A clansman would rise, lift a cup, and say, "To the land of the bens and the glens!" And up from the food the faces would move, and every man would roar out, "To the land of the bens and the glens!"
Och, a toast to start.
Our current President...
| Author | Earl Thompson |
| ISBN | 0881847275 |
Leaving behind his crumpled mother with competing feelings of disgust and longing for her glory days of radiant, knee-weakening red hair and run-free hose, Jack flees his taboo-transgressing penury in order to inveigle his way into the United States Navy and swap the dust and grime of urban-hopping...
| Author | Cyril Connolly |
| ISBN | 0892550783 |
An enduring classic by one of England's finest critics, on why so many gifted writers fall short of attaining greatness.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.--Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England,...
In the 1930s B. Traven wrote an epic of the birth of the Mexican revolution in what have become known as the "Jungle Novels." Government is the first of the six novels that comprise the series.
Depicting the political corruption that infected even the smallest villages in Mexico, the novel tells...
| Author | Ryōkan |
| ISBN | 1590309820 |
Ryokan (1758–1831) is, along with Dogen and Hakuin, one of the three giants of Zen in Japan. But unlike his two renowned colleagues, Ryokan was a societal dropout, living mostly as a hermit and a beggar. He was never head of a monastery or temple. He liked playing with children. He had no dharma heir....
| Author | Giacomo Casanova |
| ISBN | 0801856620 |
In volumes 1 and 2, Casanova tells the story of his family, his first loves, and his early travels. With the death of his grandmother, he is sent to a seminary--but is soon expelled. He is briefly imprisoned in the fortress of Sant' Andrea. After wandering from Naples to Rome in search of a patron, he enters...
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and...
| Author | Gustave Flaubert |
| ISBN | 0140435824 |
At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a “sensibility on tour,” Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer’s impressions during his 1849 voyages. Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert’s traveling companion, Maxime...
| Author | Ivan Turgenev |
| ISBN | 0940322455 |
Turgenev was the most liberal-spirited and unqualifiedly humane of all the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and in Virgin Soil, his biggest and most ambitious work, he sought to balance his deep affection for his country and his people, with his growing apprehensions about what their...
| Author | Ivan Bunin |
| ISBN | 1566637589 |
"The Gentleman from San Francisco" is easily the best known of Ivan Bunin's stories and has achieved the stature of a masterpiece. But Bunin's other stories and novellas are not to be missed. Over the last several years a great many of them have been freshly and brilliantly translated by Graham Hettlinger....
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian short story writer and a playwright. His playwriting career produced four classics, while his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practiced as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 0140439900 |
De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín.
At the start of 1895, Oscar Wilde was the toast of London, widely feted for his most recent stage success, An Ideal Husband. But by...
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia
| Author | Clifford Geertz |
| ISBN | 0520004590 |
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant...
| Author | Geoffrey Hosking |
| ISBN | 0674781198 |
The Soviet Union crumbles and Russia rises from the rubble, once again the great nation -- a perfect scenario, but for one point: Russia was never a nation. And this, says the eminent historian Geoffrey Hosking, is at the heart of the Russians' dilemma today, as they grapple with the rudiments of nationhood....
| Author | Fawn M. Brodie |
| ISBN | 0393301664 |
Starting in a hollowed log of wood—some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself "Why?" and the only echo is "damned fool! . . . the Devil drives!"
So Richard Francis Burton, preparing for an exploration of the lower Congo in 1863, wrote to Monckton...
First Footsteps in East Africa
| Author | Richard Francis Burton |
| ISBN | 1428017305 |
Chock full of ethnographical information about the Muslims of Somalia, Richard Burton's "First Footsteps in Africa" is a great look at a white man's first forays into that area of the continent. As an adventure novel, the book is kind of dry -- Burton essentially travels to an area, is held there by its...
