Penguin.com (usa)

It began in 2001 with our thunderously acclaimed new translation of Anna Karenina. Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club, and with our edition introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to Tolstoy's great romantic epic.

Then last year we published a stunning new translation of War and Peace, which was repeatedly singled out as the best translation into English of Tolstoy's masterpiece. London's Independent said, "Anthony Briggs's wonderful new translation will keep you enraptured. Read it, and weep and wonder, but read it." The Washington Times called it the "essential translation for its generation." And John Bayley effused that "Anthony Briggs has rendered not only the simplicity but also the subtlety of the book's scale and effect with a particular exactness and a vigorous precision not to be found, I think, in any previous translation."

Now, for the first time in Penguin Classics, we're publishing Tolstoy's great short novel based on his time spent in the Russian army—The Cossacks— together in one volume with The Sevastopol Sketches, his extraordinary stories set during the Crimean War. These new translations, by the translator of the Penguin Classics editions of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov,bring to readers of English some of the most brilliant stories in our literature about the nature of war, and are the perfect way to work your way up to the mammoth War and Peace.

Look for more new Tolstoy translations from Penguin Classics in future seasons: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories and The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories next year, and Childhood; Boyhood; Youth and Resurrection the following year, all leading up to the celebration in 2010 of the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death, by which point you may well be an expert in all things Tolstoy, courtesy of Penguin Classics.