Ivan Bunin's first published work, The Village is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centering on episodes in the lives of two peasant brothers — characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human — it reveals the pettiness, violence and ignorance of life on the land.

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby's impossible love for a married woman emerge, until events spiral into tragedy.

While holidaying at a villa on the French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy American couple, meet the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Her arrival causes a stir in their social circle and exposes the cracks in their fragile marriage. As their relationship unravels, the glimpses of their troubled past emerge, and a series of disturbing events unfolds.

This Side of Paradise charts the life of Amory Blaine, an ambitious young man loosely based on Fitzgerald himself, as he moves from his well-heeled Midwest home to study at Princeton and then starts frequenting the circles of high society as an aspiring writer. Experiencing failure and frustration in love and in his career, Blaine finds his youthful enthusiasm gradually giving way to disillusionment, cynicism and a life of dissolution.

The heir to his grandfather's considerable fortune, Anthony Patch is led astray from the path to gainful employment by the temptations and distractions of the 1920s Jazz Age. His descent into dissolution and profligacy is accelerated by his marriage to the attractive but turbulent Gloria, and the couple soon discover the dangerous flip side of a life of glamour and debauchery.

The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol's humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase suddenly take on a bizarre life of their own. The second story, Ivan Krylov's Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather, has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner whose actions prove him to be otherwise. The final two stories, by the Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, are satirical attacks on the inability of civil servants to cope with real life, and on Russia's autocracy. Together, they represent some of Russia's finest comic writing before the twentieth century.

A wide-ranging Russian novel dealing with the ideas of language, power, and national identity, this comic and thought-provoking work has tremendous relevance to the present day In a world a few decades from now, Russia has descended into a farcical civil war. With an extreme right-wing cult in power, racial tensions have divided the country into the Varangians — those who consider themselves to be the original Aryan settlers of Russia — and the Khazars, the liberals and Jews driven out of Moscow by recent events. Morale has reached an all-time low as the brutality and pointlessness of the situation is becoming more and more apparent. What is left of the fighting now revolves around capturing and recapturing Degunino, a seemingly magical village with an abundance of pies, vodka, and accommodating womenfolk. But there is also a third people — timid, itinerant, and on the brink of extinction — who lay claim to Degunino and Russia as their homeland. Against this rich backdrop of events, this story follows the lives of four couples struggling to escape the chaos and stupidity of the war around them: a teenage girl who adopts a homeless man, a poet turned general separated from his lover, a provincial governor in love with one of the natives, and a legendary military commander who is sleeping with the enemy.

«McCarthy's debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great effect that the narrative's pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who suffers memory loss as the result of an accident that «involved something falling from the sky», receives an £8.5 million settlement and uses the money to re-enact, with the help of a «facilitator» he hires, things remembered or imagined. He buys an apartment building to replicate one that has come to him in a vision and then populates it with people hired to re-enact, over and over again, the mundane activities he has seen his imaginary neighbors performing. He stages both ordinary acts (the fixing of a punctured tire) and violent ones (shootings and more), each time repeating the events many times and becoming increasingly detached from reality and fascinated by the scenarios his newfound wealth has allowed him to create — even though he professes he doesn't «want to understand them». McCarthy's evocation of the narrator's absorption in his fantasy world as it cascades out of control is brilliant all the way through the abrupt climax.»

The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, Berlin). The letters, here published for the first time, display much of Lampedusa's distinctive style present in his later work; not only the razor sharp introspection, but also a wicked sense of humor, playful in its description of the comedie humaine. United and underpinned by the genre of the novel, Lampedusa's lifetime obsession, some letters also read like excerpts from a Stendhalian travel journal, whilst others are pickwickian adventures populated with comic, exaggerated personalities.

A tale of intrigue, deception, murder and retribution, Boris Godunov charts the rise and fall of an ambitious prince who cannot avoid facing the consequences of his dark past. Based on the historical figure of the nobleman Boris Godunov, who seized power from Ivan the Terrible's successor in sixteenth-century Russia, and partly inspired by Shakespeare's Macbeth, Alexander Pushkin's 1825 play showcases the author's mastery of verse and dramatic form. Also included in this volume are Pushkin's celebrated four Little Tragedies: Mozart and Salieri, The Miserly Knight, The Stone Guest and A Feast During the Plague.

In Bulgakov's Diaboliad, the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the First Central Depot for the Materials for Matches, and tries to seek out his newly assigned superior Kalsoner, responsible for his dismissal. His quest through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy takes on the increasingly surreal dimensions of a nightmare. This early satirical story, reminiscent of Gogol and Dostoevsky, was first published in 1924 and incurred the wrath of pro-Soviet critics. Along with the three other stories in this volume which also feature explorations of the absurd and bizarre, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the artistic development of the author of Master and Margarita.

In 1864, Lewis Carroll sent Alice's Adventures under Ground, a handwritten and illustrated manuscript, as a gift to Alice Liddell, the daughter of his Oxford dean. This formed the basis for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland — introducing timeless characters such as Alice, the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts and the Gryphon — although it differs considerably from the later work, with the author himself approving its publication in 1886. Alice's Adventures under Ground provides an enchanting glimpse into Carroll's imaginative process, and deserves to be ranked as a classic for all ages in its own right.

«When Sofia Behrs married Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of «War and Peace», husband and wife regularly exchanged diaries covering the years from 1862 to 1910. Sofia's life was not an easy one: she idealized her husband, but was tormented by him; even her many children were not an unmitigated blessing. In the background of her life was one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history: the transition from old feudal Russia to the three revolutions and three major international wars. Yet it is as Sofia Tolstoy's own life story, the study of one woman's private experience, that the diaries are most valuable and moving. They are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life and to remain indomitable. It contains a forward by Doris Lessing.»

When the world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbour, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga — Lensky's fiancee — Onegin finds himself dragged into a tragedy of his own making. Eugene Onegin — presented here in a sparkling translation by Roger Clarke, along with extensive notes and commentary — was the founding text of modern Russian literature, marking a clean break from the high-flown classical style of its predecessors and introducing the quintessentially Russian hero and heroine, which would remain the archetypes for novelists throughout the nineteenth century.

«Leo Tolstoy's most personal novel, Anna Karenina scrutinizes fundamental ethical and theological questions through the tragic story of its eponymous heroine. Anna is desperately pursuing a good, «moral» life, standing for honesty and sincerity. Passion drives her to adultery, and this flies in the face of the corrupt Russian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the aristocrat Konstantin Levin is struggling to reconcile reason with passion, espousing a Christian anarchism that Tolstoy himself believed in.»

«Fathers and Children», arguably the first modern novel in the history of Russian literature, shocked readers when it was first published in 1862 — the controversial character of Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist intent on rejecting all existing traditional values and institutions, providing a trenchant critique of the established order. Turgenev's masterpiece investigates the growing nihilist movement of mid-nineteenth-century Russia — a theme which was to influence Dostoevsky and many other European writers — in a universal, and often hilarious, story of generational conflict, and the clash between the old and the new.»

«Having crash-landed in the Sahara desert, a pilot comes across a young boy who introduces himself as the «Little Prince» and tells him the story of how he grew up on a tiny asteroid before travelling across the galaxies and coming to Earth. His encounters and discoveries, seen through childlike, innocent eyes, give rise to candid reflections on life and human nature. First published in 1943 and featuring the author's own watercolour illustrations, The Little Prince has since become a classic philosophical fable for young and old, as well as a global publishing phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide and being translated into dozens of languages.»