Today, Leo Tolstoy is best remembered for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both epic, sweeping works that unfold on a grand scale. But Tolstoy also dabbled in short-form fiction, and the results are similarly remarkable. This volume brings together a number of Tolstoy''s shorter pieces, including ""A Russian Proprietor"" and ""The Three Deaths.""
In this 1906 novel, a comet's mysterious green fog causes a profound transformation of the world. William Leadford, a young Socialist student, seeks both improvements in labor conditions and revenge on the middle-class Nettie for spurning his love. On the evening he plans to kill Nettie, a comet enters the atmosphere and emits a sleep-inducing fog. William awakens to a new world in which he finds peace of mind, peace among nations, and no industrial pollution.
William Le Queux was a famous journalist, writer and celebrated novelist, a master of the spy genre, and a vociferous critic of Britain's weak military defences before the First World War, known at the time and for the next twenty years as "The Great War". He is acknowledged as the principal precursor of that famous spy story author of the second half of the twentieth century, namely Ian Fleming.
