A sex trafficking victim wreaks vengeance on the criminal gang who enslaved her. Born into poverty in the heart of Eastern Europe, Natalia Nicolaeva dreams of a better life. When she is offered a job abroad, however, the promise of the outside world is as terrifying as it is thrilling. After gathering the courage to leave her tiny village, it doesn’t take long before Natalia’s worst fears are confirmed. Kidnapped by a vicious gang of criminals, Natalia must fight first for her honor and then for her life. Russia Girl portrays Natalia’s transformation from innocent farm girl to lethal dispenser of vigilante justice. This is one girl they never should have messed with. Be warned, this story is gritty and raw, but guaranteed to keep your pulse pounding. Author Q&A with Kenneth Rosenberg Q: This novel is a bit of a different take on the typical thriller genre. What was the inspiration for this story? A: I saw a documentary about women from Eastern Europe who were lured abroad under false pretenses and sold into prostitution. The film told the stories of five women who had managed to escape captivity and survive to tell about it. My book was inspired by their stories of courage. Q: Does that mean some of your novel is actually true? A: The circumstances in the first half of the novel were based on actual events. I decided to take that story and turn it into a thriller, where the main character becomes a kick-ass vigilante, dispensing her own brand of justice. Q: This book is set in Istanbul and on a farm in the breakaway republic of Transnistria. Do you have any experience in these places? Have you been to them? A: When I was working on the book, I traveled to Istanbul for research. I spent a week walking the streets and exploring the neighborhoods where it is set. Transnistria is more of a challenge, with complicated visa requirements, but I did spend time just across the border in Ukraine, which I felt was similar enough to give me a sense for the region. Q: Who have you been most influenced by as a writer? A: I’ve always loved a good international thriller. I guess this goes back to my childhood, when my friends and I loved all of the James Bond movies and couldn’t wait for the newest one to come out. Later, I came to be a big fan of the Bourne series. My books are probably closest in DNA to the Millennium Series by Stieg Larsson, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. They both involve a strong female character who goes through hell but comes out fighting. Q: Does this mean we can expect more from Natalia Nicolaeva? A: Absolutely! I’ve already finished the next two books. Vendetta Girl is set in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Spy Girl takes place in London. Mystery Girl is set in Budapest and is coming along nicely. I hope that Natalia has a long and illustrious career of fighting injustice all around the world.

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

Illuminates the role that private schools for Jewish girls played in Russian Jewish society and documents their influence on contemporary political discourse and educational innovation.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction

Award-winning writer Kingsley Amis's newest novel is a dazzling romp through a territory he has made triumphantly his own--the battle of the sexes and the conflicting claims of love and integrity. Art, literature, political correctness, and the gender war all come under Amis's seasoned scalpel in this corrosively funny academic satire.

In A Woman's Kingdom, Michelle Lamarche Marrese explores the development of Russian noblewomen's unusual property rights. In contrast to women in Western Europe, who could not control their assets during marriage until the second half of the nineteenth century, married women in Russia enjoyed the right to alienate and manage their fortunes beginning in 1753. Marrese traces the extension of noblewomen's right to property and places this story in the broader context of the evolution of private property in Russia before the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Historians have often dismissed women's property rights as meaningless. In the patriarchal society of Imperial Russia, a married woman could neither work nor travel without her husband's permission, and divorce was all but unattainable. Yet, through a detailed analysis of women's property rights from the Petrine era through the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Marrese demonstrates the significance of noblewomen's proprietary power. She concludes that Russian noblewomen were unique not only for the range of property rights available to them, but also for the active exercise of their legal prerogatives.A remarkably broad source base provides a solid foundation for Marrese's conclusions. These sources comprise more than eight thousand transactions from notarial records documenting a variety of property transfers, property disputes brought to the Senate, noble family papers, and a vast memoir literature. A Woman's Kingdom stands as a masterful challenge to the existing, androcentric view of noble society in Russia before Emancipation.

Recently unearthed in the archives of Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, Nina Lugovskaya's diary offers rare insight into the life of a teenage girl in Stalin's Russia-when fear of arrest was a fact of daily life. Like Anne Frank, thirteen-year-old Nina is conscious of the extraordinary dangers around her and her family, yet she is preoccupied by ordinary teenage concerns: boys, parties, her appearance, who she wants to be when she grows up. As Nina records her most personal emotions and observations, herreflections shape a diary that is as much a portrait of her intense inner world as it is the Soviet outer one. Preserved here, these markings-the evidence used to convict Nina as a "counterrevolutionary"- offer today's reader a fascinating perspective on the era in which she lived.