An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the 2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling “everything you need for suicide”; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn’t join it as there’s no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future.

The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described “conceivers” who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper. (What, after all, is your run-of-the-mill scribbler of stories if not an accomplished corruptor of conceptions?) The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet in a firelit room filled with empty black bookshelves where they strive to top one another by developing ever unlikelier, ever more perfect conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a merry medieval cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men’s minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. But in this book set in an ominous Soviet Moscow of the 1920s, the members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, while all are under the spell of its despotic President, and there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual—or, for that matter, letters—may be.

Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time. When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.

This classic by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author is her nonfiction masterpiece--a tale of life and death on Miami's streets, which she covered for 18 years for "The Miami Herald." Reissue.

He fell in love with her at first sight--but their romance didn't begin until after she died.

First published in 1959, this is the autobiography of one of the greatest authorities ever on forensic medicine, who was a contemporary and, from time to time, a courtroom opponent of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. The author describes his early days in New Zealand, his days in Edinburgh and his First World War experiences in Egypt. In 1928 he returned to Edinburgh as Professor of Forensic Medicine and, from his unique knowledge and experience, wrote brilliant chapters in the annals of the British courts until his retirement in 1953. A gripping account of baffling murders solved in the laboratories by the greatest pathologist of our time. “The autobiography of a British expert in forensic medicine and ballistics and medico-legal testimony is a thoroughly absorbing book for those whose special interest is in true crime material [...] There’s humanity, humor and charm in the telling and followers of criminology should be pleased with this addition.”—Kirkus Review