Virginia Woolf's only autobiographical writing is to be found in this collection of five unpublished pieces.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.
Giovanna Spendel Book order (chronological)




White nights
- 128 pages
- 5 hours of reading
'My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?' A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.
Heart of a Dog
- 123 pages
- 5 hours of reading
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 unexpected: 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 seen as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.
Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli: L'abisso e altri racconti
- 300 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) appartiene agli autori più noti e più controversi della letteratura russa, ai suoi tempo confortato da un successo di pubblico che può essere paragonato a quello di un Tolstoj o di un Cechov... Contiene: I sette impiccati L'abisso Giuda Iscariota Lazzaro I cristiani Dies irae Così fu