Excited at the release of a little project I’ve been putting together.
Leonid Andreyev – Selected Stories
A Russian titan, Leonid Andreyev stands as a colossus alongside the many giants of his country’s literary lineage. Selected for this collection are many of his finest short stories. A practitioner in the darkest recesses of the human heart and imagination, his tales delve the wretched depths of madness and horror. Dazzling in its psychological complexity, arresting in its sombre and audacious realism, Andreyev’s short fiction illuminates and shape-shifts as emphatically as it frightens and repels. From the encapsulation of the psyche of a nation to the solitary anxieties of the individual, Andreyev, with exemplary skill, reveals the unfathomable forces that guide the soul and move the blood. Included within are stories of transcendent terror, metaphysical in scope, some grounded in the brutal caress of nature’s cruelties, others pivoting on the arbitrariness of a potentially godless universe. Andreyev’s characters wrestle to equivalent degree with the external and internal. Employing searing intensity, they live, and inevitably pay the price for the impertinence of doing so. Whether melancholic or bitter, resigned, ignorant, insane, innocent, or guilty, those who populate Andreyev’s stories face fate’s capriciousness. In mesmerising fashion Andreyev visits the prison cell, the public execution, the diseased family home, and the nightmare of natural catastrophe. His version of the Biblical landscape is electrifyingly gothic. A writer of immense power, unflinching and unrelenting, Leonid Andreyev has left us the beneficiaries of his incendiary work. Some of which is included in this volume.
The stories are accompanied by a selection of abstract illustrations designed to compliment the evocative tone of the pieces.
Watch the trailer here or here
Get a copy at Amazon US and UK, and in hardback here
