Russian Century

Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

With intrigue that rivals the best le Carre novels, Russians Among Us tells the urgent story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the United States and the West from the end of the Cold War to the present Spies have long been a source of great fascination in the world of fiction, but...

From an award-winning scholar, this definitive history reveals the tensions and transformations of the Russian Revolution. “McMeekin writes muscular history. His Russian Revolution grips the reader.” —Niall Ferguson In The Russian Revolution, acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin traces the...

Twenty-six days. One impossible deadline. A novel written in the grip of the addiction it portrays. Alexei Ivanovich is a young Russian tutor at a European gambling resort, hopelessly in love with Polina, his employer's stepdaughter. She treats him with calculated cruelty, alternating between encouragement and contempt, demanding he prove his devotion through increasingly degrading acts. When she asks him to win money for her at roulette, he discovers something more intoxicating than love: the heightened intensity of everything at stake, the suspension of rational thought, the conviction he...

The greatest novel ever written — in the only English translation authorized by Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy began writing War and Peace in 1863, when he was thirty-five years old, recently married, and living on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He finished it six years later. In between, he read everything about Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia, interviewed survivors, rewrote the opening section eight times, and produced a book that contains within it a novel, a historical essay, a philosophical treatise, and a love story — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in open contradiction with ...

Family Happiness stands as one of Leo Tolstoy's most intimate and psychologically penetrating early works, written in 1859 when the author was just thirty-one years old. This slender novella, composed nearly a decade before the epic scope of War and Peace, reveals Tolstoy's already masterful ability to dissect the complexities of human relationships with surgical precision and profound empathy. The story unfolds through the voice of Masha, a seventeen-year-old girl who falls in love with Sergey Mikhaylych, her late father's friend and her family's guardian. What begins as a tale of ...

Petersburg, 1914. The white nights are beautiful, the literary cafés are arguing about art and apocalypse, and the drawing rooms of the intelligentsia are full of people whose cultivation of sensibility has been conducted, for a generation, at the expense of any adequate preparation for what is coming. The poet Bessonov — Silver Age genius, capable of seeing the catastrophe and incapable of doing anything with the seeing except rendering it in verse — moves through this world with the ease of someone who has mistaken the most beautiful form of inadequacy for a sufficient relationship ...

In Mind Power: Into the 21st Century, John Kehoe has articulated a set of life-changing principles for charting a course to success and happiness. More than that, however, Mind Power: Into the 21st Century presents a remarkably specific and practical guide.

Instant New York Times Bestseller! Why did one of the world’s most successful business titans, an oil magnate who rivaled the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, disappear from history? The author of the acclaimed bestseller The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel has the enthralling answer. With...

Can the dream of freedom overcome fear and oppression? In this novel spanning Prague’s tumultuous twentieth century, friendships and marriages are tested to the limit. In the summer of 1914, young love beckons and the future seems bright for three friends as they reach adulthood, but the dark clouds of war throw into stark relief the differences between them which had never mattered before. From World War One and the heady days of liberty which follow, to Nazi occupation during World War Two, and afterwards Communist dictatorship, life threatening risks must be taken. Friends and families...

A young Russian woman comes into her own in the midst of revolution and civil war in this "brilliant" novel set in "a world of furious beauty" (Los Angeles Review of Books).After the loves and betrayals of The Revolution of Marina M., young poet Marina Makarova finds herself alone amid the...

A Family Chronicle by Sergei Timofeyevich Aksakov is a timeless Russian classic that blends memoir, family saga, and cultural history. First published in 1856, this deeply personal work traces the lives of Aksakov’s ancestors, parents, and relatives, offering readers a vivid portrait of provincial Russian life from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. Unlike the sweeping epics of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Aksakov’s masterpiece shines in the quiet details: the rhythms of the estate, the moral struggles of family members, and the passing of traditions across generations. His ...

When a recent skeleton among ancient bones raises questions—and danger—forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is the only one who can solve the case in this “triumphant second appearance” (Publishers Weekly) from #1 New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs. Tempe Brennan is...

Bestselling author Douglas Century reveals the untold story of the epic rise and fall of Boris Nayfeld, also known as Biba, one of the most notorious Russian mob bosses of our era. Boris Nayfeld, a.k.a. “Biba,” is the last living boss of the old-school Russian mob in America, and he’s...

The New York Times bestselling author of Dark Invasion and The Last Goodnight once again illuminates the lives of little-known individuals who played a significant role in America’s history as he chronicles the incredible true story of a critical, recently declassified counterintelligence...

“This remarkable account of the 1961 race into space is a thrilling piece of storytelling….It is high definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched.” (The Times, London, Front Page Lead Review) “Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded...

“A poignant, tender story of families and sisters divided by the cruelty of political chance–my heart ached for them on every page." Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network *contains exclusive audio content* A city divided. When the Berlin Wall goes up, Karin is on...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A searing debut about the transcendent power of love in wartime, hailed as “an absolute masterpiece” (Sarah Jessica Parker, Entertainment Weekly)—from the renowned author of Mercury Pictures Presents ...

To live among wolves, first you must become one An unmissable new spy thriller from best-selling master of the genre, Alex Gerlis. War is coming to Europe. British spymaster Barnaby Allen begins recruiting a network of agents in Germany. With diplomatic relations quickly unravelling, this pack...