Described by Dostoevsky as "flawless" and by Faulkner as the best novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of infidelity and vengeance. Set against the backdrop of high society in in 19th-century Moscow and Saint Petersburg, it portrays the doomed love affair between sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing Count Vronsky. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy brought to perfection the novel of social realism, creating a masterpiece that bares the Russian soul. As Matthew Arnold wrote, "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life." Anna Karenina is a big book, and most publishers try to pack it into small newsprint pages with tiny, nearly unreadable type. This edition, on the other hand, has been newly designed and printed on large-format, high-quality paper with easy-to-read type, making it a deluxe volume at a still-reasonable price.