Series: riverrun editions

The beautiful illusion, when reading Tolstoy, is that one is looking directly at the world, as opposed to a depiction – Andrew O'Hagan from his preface to Childhood, Boyhood and Youth Published in 1852, when he was just twenty-four, Childhood was Tolstoy's first published work, and the first of a trilogy of stories that evoke the upbringing and traditional education...

"How truth thickens and deepens when it migrates from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening is one of the thrills of Tolstoy's stories" Sharon Cameron in her preface to Hadji Murad and Other Stories This, the third volume of Tolstoy's shorter fiction, concentrates on his later stories, including one of his greatest, Hadji Murad. In the...

"How truth thickens and deepens when it migrates from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening is one of the thrills of Tolstoy's stories." Sharon Cameron in her preface to The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories Tolstoy wrote in many genres for different audiences. In this, the first of three volumes of his shorter fiction...

"How truth thickens and deepens when it migrates from didactic fable to the raw experience of a visceral awakening is one of the thrills of Tolstoy's stories." Sharon Cameron in her preface to The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories This second volume of Tolstoy's shorter fiction, selected by the critic Sharon Cameron, contains 'Family Happiness', 'The Devil', and The Kreutzer...

The cult novel of fin de siècle decadence that inspired Oscar Wilde. 'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't give a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before.' The title page of the first complete English translation of Against Nature (published in French as A Rebours) included the caption 'the book...

'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with one of the most arresting opening sentences in literature,' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface. A Portrait first appeared in instalments in the modernist magazine The Egoist in 1914, before it came out as a book in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. An...

'Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who's standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.' Joshua Cohen, from his preface to He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka. This is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that...

A married woman restlessly seeks a deeper love. An insomniac ponders the meagreness of his life. A man loses the respect of his family because of a counterfeit coin. A duel of wits escalates into a clash of cultures - and more. The Duel and Other Stories is the second in an exclusive three-volume edition of Chekhov's stories. Encompassing the...

‘Like an artist working an empty sky into a busy cityscape, or an empty chair into a crowded family portrait, Joyce creates spaces where the reader is left to themselves’ Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface to Dubliners. Set in the late 19th and early 20th century, Dubliners is made up of fifteen stories, which all sit within the realm of...

A man and woman fall in love in a seaside town. The only trouble is, they're both married to other people. A schoolmaster is scandalized by his sweetheart riding a bicycle. A woman falls in love with a series of men, each of whom leaves her in different ways. Chekhov's stories capture Russian provincial life in the late nineteenth century...

'It is not that Ulysses excludes us; it is, rather, that it includes us in ways that no other work prepares us for. The question is not "what is a novel?", but what can a novel be? Ulysses is the answer.' Patrick McGuinness from his preface to Ulysses: The Restored Text Initially rejected by several printers in Dublin and London...

Freud the writer is what Joan Riviere so elegantly presents to the English-Language reader Lisa Appignanesi from her preface to Sigmund Freud: Essays and Papers This collection focuses on the set of Riviere's translations that made up the first library of Freud in English. It includes his papers on metapsychology, applied psychoanalysis, and technique. Within these broader categories are subjects...

A young man tries to figure out the best way to live. A young woman struggles to assert herself within a regrettable marriage. A doctor attempts to befriend his most interesting patient. This riverrun edition presents a selection of Chekhov's longer stories—novellas, effectively—in Constance Garnett's timeless translations. These four stories, The Wife, The Steppe, Ward No. 6, and My Life,...

'I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps from the hour I was born' A man goes mad because he is happy. A civil servant behaves like a monster at a wedding-party. A man is swallowed by a crocodile, but not eaten nor seriously damaged. Dostoevsky's stories inhabit similarly volcanic atmospheres as his novels, places of curiosity...