万本电子书0元读

万本电子书0元读

The Investigator
The Investigator
Margarita Khemlin
¥90.03
The Investigator is set in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1950s. With Stalin at the helm, the post-war Soviet Union is struggling to rebuild and to heal the nation of its multiple wounds. Plots and conspiracies abound and challenges to socialist values, real and imagined, proliferate. A young woman is murdered in a typical Soviet town. In the spirit of the era everyone is a suspect. The investigator of the title sets out to solve the crime. A former intelligence officer who seeks to embody the ideals of the young Soviet Union, he introduces the reader to a polyphony of alternative voices that, together with his own, weave the unique fabric of this striking novel.
The Shining Light
The Shining Light
Galymkair Mutanov
¥90.03
Poetry has always been in the Kazakh blood, and Galym Mutanov is one of the newly independent nation’s leading poets, a shining light in the Kazakh literary world. In the range of his poetry, Mutanov truly captures the essence of the Kazakh spirit – from the tough and ageless traditions of the wild steppe to moments of tender intimacy. The measured Islamic wisdom and deep sense of morality so intrinsic to Kazakh life of old shines through in verse after verse. The figure of Abai, the 19th century visionary, the deeply spiritual poet of the steppe, looms large over Kazakh poetry. Mutanov takes up the challenge that Abai threw down – to create verse that is both steeped in the Kazakh tradition of oral verse yet rises to a new clarity and spirituality relevant today. Mutanov wrote originally in Kazakh, but many Kazakhs speak only Russian. So his poems were translated into Russian by leading poets Vladimir Buryazev and M. Adibaeva. It is these Russian versions that provided the source for John Farndon’s translations with Olga Nakston for this collection. Galym Mutanov is not only a poet but something of a polymath. He is a hugely distinguished academic, with over 400 scientific papers to his credit, and currently rector of al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Alma-Ata. In 2013, his achievements were recognized in France by the award of a Chevalier L'Ordre des Palmes académiques.
Conversations before Silence: The selected poetry of Oles Ilchenko
Conversations before Silence: The selected poetry of Oles Ilchenko
Oles Ilchenko
¥90.03
An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a tendency to collapse into itself, often forcing the reader to reevaluate a word or line, to reread a previous word to focus on the poet’s inner logic. This fragmentary incompleteness and permeability mimics much the way human consciousness works without the filter of the written communicative convention of sentences and grammatical structure. This “slipperiness” and rapid shifting of voice comprises one of the essential invariants in Ilchenko’s poetics. The poet also flaunts many traditional poetic Ukrainian conventions. Like ee cummings he tends to avoid capital letters or punctuation such as exclamation points. One will find only commas and dashes for pauses, and an occasional period in his poems, which do not always end with the finality of that punctuation mark. In doing this, the poet often suggests a fragment or slice of his life broken off on the page and to be continued at some point in time. He is a fascinating poet whose idiom and unique manner of expression translates seamlessly into the poetics of contemporary English.
Sberbank:The Rebirth of Russia’s Financial Giant
Sberbank:The Rebirth of Russia’s Financial Giant
Eugeny Karasyuk
¥90.03
The book sheds light on how Sberbank of Russia was transformed from the old-school institution with outlived Soviet practices into a decent member of the world’s financial elite and one of the richest brands on the planet. Sberbank reform was an unprecedented event in the history of Russian business. Never before such a large post-Soviet establishment has undergone such a radical and total reorganization according to western patterns. Initiator of the Sberbank reform in 2007 is the ex-minister and well-known liberal German Gref, whose ambitious plan was to turn this huge, unwieldy institution into an advanced financial company. Wins and losses of Gref’s team became not just a personal achievement or the bank’s chief failure. They essentially answered the key question of Russian business: can people in Russia work on the same level as people in the West? For the purpose of this book, journalist Eugeny Karasyuk conducted dozens of interviews with employees of Sberbank on different levels. The result is a breathtaking economic thriller with a remarkable story of how progressive management techniques were implemented in that reality. Sberbank: The Rebirth of Russia’s Financial Giant will be interesting to anyone seriously considering reforms in one’s company, and those who are curious about doing business with Russia. Translated from the Russian by Lewis White.
Leo Tolstoy:Flight from Paradise
Leo Tolstoy:Flight from Paradise
Pavel Basinsky
¥90.03
Over a hundred years ago something outrageous happened in Yasnaya Polyana. Count Leo Tolstoy, a famous author eighty two years of age at the time, took off, destination unknown. Since then, circumstances surrounding the writer’s whereabouts during his final days and his eventual death bred many myths and legends. Russian popular writer and reporter Pavel Basinsky picks into archives and presents his interpretation of facts prior to Leo Tolstoy’s mysterious disappearance. Basinsky follows Leo Tolstoy throughout his life up to the very end. Reconstructing the story from historical documents, he creates a visionary account of events that led to the Tolstoy family drama. Flight from Paradise is of special interest to international researchers of Leo Tolstoy’s life and work, and is recommended to a wider audience worldwide.
Moscow in the 1930s:A Novel from the Archives
Moscow in the 1930s:A Novel from the Archives
Natalia Gromova
¥90.03
Moscow in the 1930s: A Novel from the Archives reveals Moscow as it was in a bygone age, a city now found only on old maps, but an era that continues to haunt us today. The novel features a wide cast of characters, who are all tied together by the author herself. The reader plunges into the remarkable Moscow literary scene of those days, and literature aficionados will encounter within a number of important locations for the history of Russian letters: the Dobrov house, Peredelkino, Lavrushinsky Lane, Borisoglebsky Lane – and also the names of legendary figures such as Olga Bessarabova, Maria Belkina, and Lydia Libedinskaya. History is brought to life: the author introduces the reader to Leonid Andreyev, leads us on a tour of the side-streets and alleyways of the Arbat district, and shows us the tattered notebooks of Olga Bessarabova. All this has long since fallen away into history, but now it proves so easily accessible to us.
Zo Gaat Dat In Rusland: Of Hoe Te Leven Tussen Russen
Zo Gaat Dat In Rusland: Of Hoe Te Leven Tussen Russen
Maria Konjoekova
¥90.03
Maria Konjoekova’s Zo gaat dat in Rusland, of hoe te leven tussen Russen is niet alleen een grappige, vol zelfspot geschreven handleiding voor het dagelijks leven in Rusland, het is ook een scherpzinnige en praktische gids voor het doorgronden van een land en van mensen die we vandaag de dag overal ter wereld kunnen tegenkomen. Waar komen onze meningen en vooroordelen eigenlijk vandaan? De schrijfster onderzoekt de culturele eigenaardigheden, waarvan het Russische leven doortrokken is, en geeft ook een verklaring voor de stortvloed aan ongebreidelde Russische emoties in alle mogelijke situaties. Zo rekent ze moeiteloos af met de vele misvattingen die er over de Russen bestaan en kweekt op humoristische wijze begrip voor hun, in Westerse ogen, soms onbegrijpelijke gedrag. Konjoekova wil met haar boek preken noch bekeren, ze beoogt daarentegen een brutaal, maar liefdevol inkijkje te geven in de Russische ziel. Eigenlijk is haar boek een minihandleiding voor de mens in het algemeen.
Down Among the Fishes
Down Among the Fishes
Natalka Babina
¥90.03
Down Among the Fishes revolves around the story of a woman named Alka, native of a small Belarusian village near the Polish border. Alka’s unfulfilled desire to have a child turns her into an alcoholic and a drug addict. Then, a family tragedy turns her world upside down, forcing her out of the self-destructive cycle. Together with her twin sister, she sets out to examine the chain of events that led to her grandmother’s unexpected death. Their inquiry quickly changes into a murder investigation. As the twins uncover new facts of the crime, more questions need to be answered. But will they? A rural intrigue continues to hold the villagers firm in its grasp until the very resolution.
disUNITY:A collection of novels
disUNITY:A collection of novels
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
¥90.03
The two novels included in this book are works of Russian magic realism. In the first novel, Shadowplay on a Sunless Day, Anatoly Kudryavitsky writes about life in modern-day Moscow and about an emigrant’s life in Germany. The novel deals with problems of self-identification, national identity and the crises of the generation of “new Europeans”. In the second novel, A Parade of Mirrors and Reflection, the writer turns his attention to human cloning, an issue very much at the centre of current scientific debate. He looks at the philosophical aspects of creating artificial personalities who lack emotions and experience of everyday human life through a story about secret cloning experiments being carried out in an underground laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow. Most of the clones find themselves in Grodno, Belarus, a city that, due to its geographical location, has always been an important crossroads in Eastern Europe. Each clone is a featureless person looking for their own identity; however, only one of them has a chance to succeed.
Tsunami
Tsunami
Anatoly Kurchatkin
¥90.03
Anatoly Kurchatkin’s novel, set in Russia and Thailand, ranges in time from the Brezhnev years of political stagnation, when Soviet values seemed set to endure for eternity, through Gorbachev’s Perestroika and the following tumultuous and disorientating decades. Under the surface, ancient currents are influencing the destinies of mathematician Rad, art gallery owner Jenny, entrepreneur (and spy?) Dron, American investor Chris, redundant Soviet diplomat Yelena and Thai playboy Tony in a rapidly globalizing world of laptop computers, mobile phones, credit cards and international finance. The fourteenth-century battle in which the Prince of Muscovy, inspired by St Sergius of Radonezh, defeated the Golden Horde of the Mongol Empire foreshadows a modern struggle for the soul of Russia. Tsunami was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and the Russo-Italian Moscow-Penne Prize. Translated by Arch Tait.
Goodbye, Bird
Goodbye, Bird
Aram Pachyan
¥90.03
For a twenty-eight-year-old young man who returned from the army several years ago but has yet to reacclimatize to ordinary life, every step, gesture, word, and vision is a revelation, which takes him back to the beginning, to a time when reality had lost its shape, and turned into a new and imperceptible world. In his imagination, he embodies a number of different characters, he feels the presence of his girlfriend again, and remembers friends from his childhood and from the army, who are now gone. This is a book of questions, and the answers to these questions are to be found by the reader. The novel is like a puzzle which needs to be pieced together, and the picture is not complete until the last piece is in place, until the last word of the book has been read. Translated from the Armenian by Nairi Hakhverdi.
Contours of the City
Contours of the City
Attyla Mohylny
¥90.03
Contours of the City arguably comprises one of the finest collections of free verse ever written in Ukrainian even though it was largely overlooked when it first appeared during the political transition to Ukrainian independence in 1991. It certainly deserves a broader audience both in Mohylny’s homeland as well as in the wider world. While it may be described as a one-hit wonder because of the poet’s premature death, it remains a brilliant hit for all time. Translator Michael Naydan received the Eugene Kayden Meritorious Achievement Award in Translation from the University of Colorado for a partial manuscript of his translations of Mohylny’s poetry into English in 1993. This edition includes a complete translation of Mohylny’s collection Contours of the City along with several poems translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps.
Die Verwandlung
Die Verwandlung
Franz Kafka
¥88.94
Die Verwandlung
Anatomy of a Ponzi, Scams Past and Present
Anatomy of a Ponzi, Scams Past and Present
Colleen Cross
¥88.77
Anatomy of a Ponzi, Scams Past and Present
The Flying Dutchman
The Flying Dutchman
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
¥88.70
Some time in the 1970s, Konstantin Alpheyev, a well-known Russian musicologist, finds himself in trouble with the KGB, the Russian secret police, after the death of his girlfriend, for which one of their officers may have been responsible. He has to flee from the city and to go into hiding. He rents an old house located on the bank of a big Russian river, and lives there like a recluse observing nature and working on his new book about Wagner. The house, a part of an old barge, undergoes strange metamorphoses rebuilding itself as a medieval schooner, and Alpheyev begins to identify himself with the Flying?Dutchman. Meanwhile, the police locate his new whereabouts and put him under surveillance. A chain of strange events in the nearby village makes the police officer contact the KGB, and the latter figure out who the new tenant of the old house actually is.?
A Brown Man in Russia: Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian
A Brown Man in Russia: Lessons Learned on the Trans-Siberian
Vijay Menon
¥88.70
A Brown Man in Russia?describes the fantastical travels of a young, colored American traveler as he backpacks across Russia in the middle of winter via the Trans-Siberian. The book is a hybrid between the curmudgeonly travelogues of Paul Theroux and the philosophical works of Robert Pirsig. Styled in the vein of Hofstadter, the author lays out a series of absurd, but true stories followed by a deeper rumination on what they mean and why they matter. Each chapter presents a vivid anecdote from the perspective of the fumbling traveler and concludes with a deeper lesson to be gleaned.?For those who recognize the discordant nature of our world in a time ripe for demagoguery and for those who want to make it better, the book is an all too welcome antidote. It explores the current global climate of despair over differences and outputs a very different message – one of hope and shared understanding.?At times surreal, at times inappropriate, at times hilarious, and at times deeply human,?A Brown Man in Russia?is a reminder to those who feel marginalized, hopeless, or endlessly divided that harmony is achievable even in the most unlikely of places.?
Death of the Snake Catcher
Death of the Snake Catcher
Ak Welsapar
¥88.70
This book features people from one of the most closed countries of today's world, where the passage of time resembles the passage of a caravan through the waterless desert. This world has been recreated by a true-born son of that mysterious country, a Turkmen who, at the will of fate, has now??been living for a quarter of a century in snowy Scandinavia. Is that not why two different worlds come together in?Ryazan horseradish and Tula gingerbread,?to come apart in?Love in Lilac,?in which a student from the non-free world falls in love with a girl from the West? In the story?Death of the Snake Catcher,?an old snake catcher meets one on one with a giant cobra in the heart of the desert. In the dialogue between them the author unveils the age-old interdependence of Man and untamed nature, where the fear and mistrust of the strong and the hopes and apprehensions of the weak change places but co-exist as ever.??Egyptian night of fear,?in which a boy goes to an Eastern bazaar and falls into the clutches of depraved forces, is created in the writer's characteristic style of magical realism, while the novella?Altynai?celebrates first love, radiant and sad, pure as virgin snow. Now mythical, now lyrical, Welsapar's characters face life's injustice with a surprising optimism and fortitude. The intense Asiatic colour not only of nature but of human feelings and relationships, is expressed by the author in striking, expressive language making the reader unable to close the book until the last page.
Hard Times
Hard Times
Ostap Vyshnia
¥88.70
A brilliant satirist, Ostap Vyshnia (1889-1956) sent up the shortcomings of Soviet life and bureaucracy in the 1920s. He was famous in Ukraine almost exclusively for his feuilletons, and achieved enormous popularity in this genre in the 1920s, especially among the peasant population. Called by many the father of contemporary Ukrainian satire, he became the most-read author after Taras Shevchenko. Many village and town cooperatives, schools and farms were spontaneously named in his honour. Over two million copies of his books were sold by 1930. This second revised and expanded edition is introduced by Professor Maxim Tarnawsky (University of Toronto).
Homesick
Homesick
Ward, Sela
¥88.62
The vibrant and beloved star of Once and Again and Sisters offers a story about her journey home to recapture the magic of youth in the deep South for her children and to make peace with the death of her mother.?At a time when much of America is yearning to recapture the spirit and feelings of a more innocent era, comes the paperback edition of this exceptional book, from one of our most beloved actresses: a story of one woman's journey to reconnect with the landscape of her childhood. Though best known today as the star of the television series Once Again and Sisters, Sela Ward considers herself first and foremost a small-town girl. The eldest of four children, she was raised by a father who helped her believe in herself, and by a mother who taught her a sense of the importance of virtues like self-respect, grace, and sacrifice. In her hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, within a tightly-knit community of neighbors and kin, Sela learned ways that would remain with her throughout life humble virtues that were forged in the hearth of a loving home.Long after she had established herself as a successful model and Emmy Award winning actress, Sela started her own family, and found herself pining for the comforts of her small-town childhood. In an effort to balance her children's West Coast upbringing with a taste of a more natural way of life, she and her husband built a second home on a farm in Meridian, Mississippi so that her family could retreat there several times each year.Even as Sela was reconnecting with the rhythms of home, though, her world was rocked by a crisis the family had long anticipated but never quite prepared for the death of her mother. As her family gathered around her mama's bedside, Sela's simple journey home became something far deeper: a turning point in her own life, as she pondered her mother's complicated legacy, and came to terms with just what it was she herself was searching for.Filled with warmth, storytelling, and laughter, Homesick is a book to treasure: an exploration of the lessons we carry away with us from childhood, and a celebration of the bittersweet legacy of home.
Believing Is Seeing
Believing Is Seeing
Jones, Diana Wynne
¥88.62
Believing is seeing, as the title of this outstanding collection of fantasies proclaims. And "reading is seeing more than you've ever imagined when in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Diana Wynne Jones. Here are seven tales—seven doorways to bizarre, yet strangely familiar worlds—to transport one and all. In these worlds are a child born to an ordered society but preordained to spread Dissolution . . . a girl who so loves the sun that she renounces her humanity for eternity . . . a cat and a boy, held captive by an evil magician until they can find a bigger magic of their own . . . a woman imprisoned in a strange country dominated by three ravenous wolves . . . and many other characters and stories just as exceptional. These richly drawn, razor-sharp stories showcase the skills and sheer narrative power of one of the most esteemed fantasy writers of our time.
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck
Bukowski, Charles
¥88.62
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck captures glimpses of Charles Bukowski's view on life through his poignant poetry: the pain, the hate, the love, and the beauty. He writes of lechery and pain while finding still being able to find its beauty.