By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

From the jacket: Cancer Ward, which has been compared to the master­piece of another Nobel Prize winner, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain,examines the relationships of a group of people in a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. Through their stories, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has created a vivid portrait of life in the So­viet Union. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In 1945, while a captain in the Soviet Army, he was arrested—for criticiz­ing Stalin in a letter to a friend—and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp and permanent exile. In exile, he became a patient in a cancer ward, and later re­covered. Although he was allowed to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union in 1969. When the KGB discovered the manuscript of The Gulag Archi­pelago, it became imperative for Solzhenitsyn to have the book published in the West. The authorities retaliated in 1974 by exiling him from the Soviet Union. He settled in the United States in 1976 and now lives in Vermont.

NY. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1968. 630p.

By Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Or The Devils. Translated From The Russian By Constance Garnett. “Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.” 1872 (Russian)

A Read-Me.Org classic reprint. 1916 (English). 718p.

By Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This was his last novel, published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Dostoevsky died less than four months after its publication. Set in 19th-century Russia, this book is a passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into questions of God, free will, and morality. It is a theological drama dealing with problems of faith, doubt, and reason in the context of a modernizing Russia, with a plot that revolves around the subject of patricide.

NY. Lowell Press. 1880. 600p.

By Charles Reade.

‘Hard Cash like ‘The Cloister and the Hearth' is a matter-of-fact Romance—that is, a fiction built on truths ; and these truths have been gathered by long, severe, systematic labour, from a multitude of volumes, pamphlets, journals, reports, blue-books, manuscript narratives, letters, and living people, whom I have sought out, examined, and cross-examined, to get at the truth on each main topic I have striven to handle. The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen, who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them ; and have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, and a little easy cant about Sensation * Novelists ; but in reality those passages have been written on the same system as the nautical, legal, and other scenes : the best evidence has been ransacked ; and a large portion of this evidence I shall be happy to show at my house to any brother writer who is disinterested, and really cares enough for truth and humanity to walk or ride a mile in pursuit of them.” (From Preface)

London: Chatto and Windus, 1899. 625p.

By Honoré de Balzac.

“The Wild Ass's Skin is Honoré de Balzac's 1831 novel that tells the story of a young man, Raphaël de Valentin, who discovers a piece of shagreen, in this case a rough untanned piece of a wild ass's skin, which has the magical property of granting wishes. However the fulfillment of the wisher's desire comes at a cost, after each wish the skin shrinks a little bit and consumes the physical energy of the wisher. "The Wild Ass's Skin" is at once both a work of incredible realism, in the descriptions of Parisian life and culture at the time, and also a work of supernatural fantasy, in the desires that are fulfilled by the wild ass's skin. Balzac uses this fantastical device masterfully to depict the complexity of the human nature in civilized society.”

Philadelphia: Gebbie Publishing, 1897, 324p.

By Charles Dickens.

“The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters—the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness"; the mannish lawyer Sally Brass; Quilp's brow-beaten mother-in-law; and Quilp himself, the lustful, vengeful dwarf, whose demonic energy makes a vivid counterpoint to Nell's purity.”

London: Chapman and Hall, 1840. 460p.

By A. Conan Doyle.

“ I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie.”

New York: Double, Page, 1908. 176p.

By Mark Twain.

“A young slave woman attempting to protect her son from the horrors of slavery, switches her light-skinned infant with the master's white son. This novel features a literary first — the use of fingerprinting to solve a crime.”

London: Chatto and Windus, 1905. 262p.

By Charles Dickens.

When artist Robert Seymour proposed to publishers Chapman and Hall a series of engravings featuring Cockney sporting life, with accompanying text published in monthly installments. After they were turned down by several writers finally asked 24-year-old Charles Dickens to provide the text. Dickens accepted and argued successfully that the text should be foremost and the engravings should complement the story. Seymour, an established artist resisted but finally agreed. On completion of the engravings for the second monthly part Seymour, who had a history of mental health problems, committed suicide.

NY. Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1836) 942 pages.

By Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens' twelfth novel was published in his new weekly journal, All the Year Round, without illustrations. Simultaneously with the weekly parts, the novel was also published in monthly parts with illustrations by Hablot Browne. An American edition was also published, in slightly later weekly parts (May to December 1859), in Harper's Weekly. Charles Dickens’s belief in renaissance is borne out in this epic novel—as cities are overthrown and transformed, and cynics become selfless heroes.

NY. Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1859) 401 pages.

By Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens' second novel tells the story of the orphan Oliver set against the seamy underside of the London criminal world. Published in monthly parts in Bentley's Miscellany, partly concurrent with Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby. The novel was illustrated by George Cruikshank .

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1837-1839) 452 pages.

By Colin Heston.

In this moving coming of age story set in 1950s Australia, a teen navigates his way through the rough and tumble of an old Aussie pub. Riotous pub yarns abound as he talks and talks to his dad who lies in an alcoholic coma. Caught in the past and struggling with the present, what will become of him?

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2013. 54p.

By Colin Heston.

Bordering on the cynical, toying with the absurd, this collection of original stories probes the depths and edges of human existence. The Tommie Felon Show is a story that's so post modern, it's very funny. Death at the Y is a salute to Thomas Mann, or is it a parody? And then, Rounding Error is anything but statistics. All of the twelve stories are engaging, entertaining, and perhaps best (or worst) of all, will have you wondering, "is civilized society really so screwed up?" See all reviews

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2017. 140p.

By Colin Heston.

The sequel to Man Down Under. A creature of 1950s Australian pub life, young Chooka Henderson, searches for his identity, and that of his shadowy underage girlfriend, Iris, who appears to have no identity at. Will they find themselves in each other?

From Reader’s Favorite, “…brilliant, unforgettable book about real people…sensitive, touching and poignant story.” 5 Star rating!. See all reviews

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2020. 344p.

By Colin Heston.

The opening story of MONA, inspired by the Museum of Old and New Art located in Hobart, Tasmania, sets the stage for this collection of short stories that adds an Australian flavor to Colin Heston’s acclaimed The Tommie Felon Show. As one reviewer of that collection noted “…vivid and real, some of the stories seem to jump out of the pages… engaging, hilarious, unique… a commentary on human desires, shortcomings and the society we live in…. one has to look beyond the words and the events in these stories to really appreciate them.” (Readers’ Favorite). The stories range across many styles, prose poems, jottings that are almost aphorisms, classic stories of human emotion and the contradictions of human existence, dystopian themes and settings, all engaging, never dull.

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2020. 150p.