The Fiery Angel

Author	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
ISBN	0486434095

Accused of political subversion as a young man, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor at a Siberian prison camp — a horrifying experience from which he developed this astounding semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to ten years of servitude for murdering his wife.
As...

Author	Émile Zola
ISBN	0140447423

The thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope.

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young...

Author	Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN	0393924769

The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into mouldering lives and rooms. Written shortly after The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style...

Author	Mikhail Bulgakov
ISBN	0802150594

Mikhail Bulgakov's absurdist parable of the Russian Revolution.

A world-famous Moscow professor -- rich, successful, and violently envied by his neighbors -- befriends a stray dog and resolves to achieve a daring scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland...

Author	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
ISBN	0898751047

The Insulted & Injured, published soon after Dostoevsky's political imprisonment, clearly foreshadows his later preoccupation with unconscious psychological drives & their external effects on the lives of his characters. Where his later works carry these drives to inevitably dramatic...

Author	Fyodor Sologub
ISBN	0882338080

The Petty Demon is one of the funniest Russian novels. It is also the most decadent of the great Russian classics, replete with naked boys, sinuous girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting, he is at once a victim, a monster, a silly...

Author	Andrei Bely
ISBN	0810117576

The Silver Dove, published four years before Bely's masterpiece Petersburg, is considered the first modern Russian novel. Breaking with Russian realism, and a pioneering Symbolist work, its vividly drawn characters, elemental landscapes, and rich style make it accessible to the Western reader,...

Author	Stephen O'Shea
ISBN	0802713505

•Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324, 1975 (tr. Barbara Bray)
•Stephen O'Shea, The Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of the Cathars, 2000

Driving up into Languedoc from the coast, you see the landscape change from the rolling...