Giovanna Spendel Books

Virginia Woolf's only autobiographical writing is to be found in this collection of five unpublished pieces. Readers will be struck by the extent to which she drew on these early experiences for her novels, as she tells how she exorcised the obsessive presence of her mother by writing To the Lighthouse.

Mikhail Bulgakov's absurdist parable of the Russian Revolution. A world-famous Moscow professor-rich, successful, and violently envied by his neighbors-befriends a stray dog and resolves to achieve a daring scientific "first" by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man. But the results are wholly a distinctly and worryingly human animal is on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. As in The Master and Margarita, the masterpiece he completed shortly before his death, Mikhail Bulgakov's early novel, written in 1925, combines outrageously grotesque ideas with a narrative of deadpan naturalism. The Heart of a Dog can be read as an absurd and wonderfully comic story; it can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.