While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

First published in 1923, Knight's Move is a collection of articles and short critical pieces that Viktor Shklovsky, no doubt the most original literary critic and theoretician of the twentieth century, wrote for the newspaper The Life of Art between 1919 and 1921. With his usual epigrammatic, acerbic wit and genius, Shklovsky pillories the bad writers, artists, and critics of his time, especially those who used art as a political or social tool. And at no time is Shklovsky better than when he insists with indignation and outrage that "Art has always been free of life. Its flag has never reflected the color of the flag that flies over the city fortress." As fresh and revolutionary today as they were when written nearly a century ago, these pieces promise to infuriate an English-speaking readership as much as the Russian one of the 1920s.

"Viktor Shklovsky's 1925 book Theory of Prose might have become the most important work of literary criticism in the twentieth century had not two obstacles barred its way: the crackdown by the Soviet dictatorship on Shklovsky and other Russian Formalists in the 1930s, and the unavailability of an English translation. Now translated in its entirety for the first time, Theory of Prose not only anticipates structuralism and post-structuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Arguing that writers structure their material according to artistic principles rather than from attempts to imitate "reality," Shklovsky uses Cervantes, Tolstoi, Sterne, Dickens, Bely, and Rozanov to give us a new way of thinking about fiction and, in his most impassioned moments, about the world. Benjamin Sher's lucid translation will allow Shklovsky's Theory of Prose to fulfill its destiny as a major theoretical work of the twentieth century." from back cover.

Viktor Shklovsky's "A Sentimental Journey," which borrows its title from Laurence Sterne, describes the travels of a bewildered intellectual through Russia, Persia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus during the period of the Russian Revolution. Valuable as a historical document for its first-hand account of the events during the period of 1917-1922, "A Sentimental Journey" is also an important experimental literary work--a memoir in the form of a novel. At times lyrical, disturbing, ironic, and erudite, "A Sentimental Journey" is a singular book from one of the most recognizable and influential voices of twentieth-century Russian literature.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people's novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He wrote for over seventy years, both as a very young man in the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety-year old, never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader is the first book that collects crucial writings from across Shklovsky's career, serving as an entry point for first-time readers. It presents new translations of key texts, interspersed with excerpts from memoirs and letters, as well as important work that has not appeared in English before.

"Murder, lust, shame, hypocrisy, and suicide are at the center of The Guiltless, Hermann Broch's postwar novel about the disintegration of European society in the three decades preceding the Second World War. Broch's characters - an apathetic man who can barely remember his own name; a high-school teacher and his lover who return from the brink of a suicide pact to carry on a dishonest relationship; Zerline, a lady's maid who enslaves her mistresses, prostitutes the young country girl Melitta, and metes out her own justice against the "empty wickedness" of her betters - are trapped in their indifference, prisoners of a sort of "wakeful somnolence." These men and women may mention the "imbecile Hitler," yet they prefer a nap or sexual encounter to any social action. Broch thought the kind of ethical perversity and political apathy exhibited by his characters paved the way for Nazism. He believed in the purifying power of writing and hoped that by revealing Germany's underlying guilt he could purge indifference from his own and future generations. In The Guiltless, Broch captures how apathy and ennui - very human failings - evolve into something dehumanizing and dangerous." --Book Jacket.