Lev Ozerov's finest book, Portraits Without Frames comprises fifty intimate, skillfully crafted accounts of meetings with important figures, ranging from fellow poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, to prose writers Isaac Babel and Andrey Platonov, to artists and composers Vladimir Tatlin and Dmitry Shostakovich. It is both a testament to an extraordinary life and a perceptive mini-encyclopedia of Soviet culture. Composed in delicate, rhythmic free verse, Ozerov's portraits are like nothing else in Russian poetry.

"The Prank" is a major international literary discovery: the young Anton Chekhov's own selection of the best of his early work, here appearing for the first time in any language as the single volume its author intended it to be, and featuring two stories that have not been translated into English before. In 1880, while pursuing his medical studies, Chekhov took up his pen the better to support himself and his family. In the next two years, he published more than sixty stories under various pseudonyms, soon gaining a reputation as a brilliant young writer. In 1882, he decided it was time to establish his name and claim to fame properly, and so he picked and carefully put together the twelve stories he considered his best work, intending to publish them with illustrations by his brother Nikolay, a gifted artist himself. "The Prank," as Chekhov entitled the book, was all set to go to the printer when a Tsarist censor suppressed the book. Why? Because, as Chekhov wrote to a friend, "my best stories uproot the foundations." Satires, send-ups, tales of student life, artistic ambition, hunting parties, troubled families, love and betrayal, these twelve stories, accompanied by Nikolay's illustrations, display the zest, energy, humor, and unsparing insight that were Chekhov's from the start.