Shelfology Book Pairing

Introduction by Malcolm Jones

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s greatest novel is a story of murder told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. The author's towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues—brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality—that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—the definitive version in English—magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

With an Introduction by Mary Gaitskill

by Vladimir Nabokov

'One of the greatest books I've ever read. Its heart is strange, but it is huge; let yours beat in response' MARY GAITSKILL Pale Fire, a 999-line poem, is the final work of the celebrated - and recently murdered - American author, John Francis Shade. Here that poem is transcribed, introduced and annotated (at length) by Shade's fellow scholar, neighbour and apparent friend, Charles Kinbote. Approaching this task with gusto, Kinbote's annotations reveal conclusive evidence of his own impact on Shade, disguised references to the northern land of Zembla, which he may or may not have once ruled over, and fuel for his many preoccupations and paranoia. And - as his annotations become more desperate, more deluded, more deranged - Kinbote unintentionally sheds new light on the poet's last days and the pair's 'glorious friendship'. A murder mystery, a work of wild invention, a reimagining of what the novel can do, a piece of exquisite comedy, Pale Fire is widely regarded as Nabokov's masterpiece and one of the most brilliant novels ever written. A W&N Essential with an introduction from Mary Gaitskill