Taras Bulba, and Other Tales

After a year at seminary, Ostap and Andrii come home—and their father greets them by challenging them to a fistfight. Before their mother can embrace them, Taras Bulba is testing whether his sons are Cossacks enough.

In early-nineteenth-century Ukraine, in a household hung with sabres and guns, old Taras has little patience for books, long coats, or tender farewells. He means to send his sons to the Zaporozhian Setch at once, where, he insists, a young man will learn what matters; their mother can only watch as the homecoming becomes a hurried leave-taking. Gogol sets rough hilarity beside the ache of a family pulled toward a life of war, loyalty, and danger. What will Ostap and Andrii find when their father leads them from home?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.