Showing results by publisher "Pushkin Press" in All Categories

For more than a decade, Ruth Margalit has been chronicling life in contemporary Israel for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine as the country has embraced right-wing extremism under Benjamin Netanyahu. Here she collects ten of her profiles of wide-ranging figures from across society, returning to consider and update them as a writer and mother living in Tel Aviv at a time of war.

Spring, 1892. A series of anarchist bombings have struck terror across Paris. In the chaos, the city's beloved Elzévir bookshop suffers a break-in: but the thief runs away with only a worthless decorative goblet. Then, the aristocratic Englishwoman who entrusted it to the bookshop is murdered...

Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes - finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit. Darkly funny and mesmerising, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.

In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest - the beautiful Carmilla. So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day...

When did Russia lose its chance of freedom? This is the story of how a nation's dreams of democracy died. Drawing on buried archives and off-the-record interviews, exiled journalist Mikhail Fishman gives a gripping insider account of the tragedy of modern Russia, told through the many lives of Boris Nemtsov - activist, playboy, leader-in-waiting, dissident and, finally, victim.

The best of cult author Bruno Schulz's captivatingly strange and beautiful short stories. The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.

Former political advisor Giuliano da Empoli takes us on an insider's journey through this new geopolitical reality, from the Glass Palace of the UN to the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, from top secret meetings to violent power struggles. We encounter dictators and tyrants, strongmen and AI billionaires - geopolitical predators, and the flailing leaders who desperately try to appease them.

A major classic of 1930s literature, Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight" is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire. 'On the train, everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice ...' Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there, on his honeymoon with Erszi, he soon abandon his new wife in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva.

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. A Guardian Fiction Book of the year. Sometimes discovery brings destruction. "When We Cease to Understand the World" shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness.

It's the beginning of the twentieth century, and members of the Wednesday Circle hurry through Vienna's darkening streets. In this entertaining history, psychologist Steve Ayan introduces the twentieth-century visionaries who ignited a revolution of the mind. It is a story of breakthroughs in the treatment of mental illness, but also of dubious dream interpretations, affairs with patients, and feuding factions.

Hirai is in a rut. Nearing 40, disillusioned by dating and drifting through her office job, she's starting to feel like she might just disappear. When she agrees to move in with her older colleague, Suganuma, people raise eyebrows, but the two women quickly settle into their own soothing domestic routines. Yet escaping the pressures of romantic love isn't easy.

John von Neumann was a titan of science. A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionized every field he touched, his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe—a Nobel Prize-winning physicist—thought he might represent the next step in human evolution. After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War; he designed the world's first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, and helped create atomic bombs.

I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon... I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth - a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. The weird tales in this slim volume are all linked by a play, the second act of which reveals truths so terrible and beautiful that it drives all who read it to despair: The King in Yellow .

Why do we collect? Is it to rescue objects from oblivion? Is it a kind of desire—or even a kind of madness? In this mosaic of fiction, philosophy, sociology, biography and autobiography, virtuoso thinker Robert Irwin takes us on a wayward journey through the art of collecting, and his own intellectual passions.

Virginia Mendoza's first memories are of drought. She grew up in La Mancha, Spain, the driest region in Europe. In The Search for Water, Mendoza weaves this personal reflection together with a dazzling scientific and anthropological enquiry into the ways the search for water has shaped the story of humanity. From flows of migration, agriculture and pagan rain gods to contemporary struggles with drought and climate change, Mendoza writes a gripping and inventive history of humankind as driven and united by one force: thirst.

At festive gatherings celebrating summer's peak, in reflective moments as winter gave way, Rebecca Tamás began to hear another rhythm. A faint hint that, underneath the rush of clocks and calendars, another, richer kind of time might exist. As she suffered from grief and burnout, Tamás sought a deeper connection to the movement of the seasons through an immersion in old folkways. She set out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions.

1889. As crowds rush to climb the newly unveiled Eiffel Tower, a young governess is borne up to its highest platform in the mayhem. Suddenly a scream rings out and onlookers turn away from the balcony - to find her dead. In the days that follow death strikes again and again across the city, claiming more victims who visited the tower that day. Victor Legris, bookshop owner and amateur sleuth, is determined to find the killer.

Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France. German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comrades in arms. How far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?

Trouble is the last thing Albert needs. Travelling back to his childhood home on Christmas Eve, he finds the loneliness and nostalgia of his Parisian quartier unbearable... Until, that evening, he encounters a beautiful, seemingly innocent woman at a brasserie, and his spirits are lifted. Although something about the woman disturbs him, when she invites him back to her apartment, Albert thinks he's in luck. But a monstrous scene awaits them, and he finds himself lured into the darkness against his better judgment.

1891. At dawn on the Boulevard Montmartre, the body of a barefoot young woman wearing a lavish red dress is found brutally murdered. That same day, a single red shoe is delivered to the Elzévir Bookshop, owned by amateur sleuth Victor Legris. Victor and his team of booksellers feel compelled to investigate. When they discover a corpse in a wine barrel, and then a dancer strangled in her apartment, a treacherous trail unfolds through the gleaming nightclubs, bustling cabaret bars and dark alleyways of Montmartre.