In April, the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins will publish a shorter, happier version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The book, which HarperCollins calls the "original version," is an unpublished first draft completed by Tolstoy in 1866. The new edition, which weighs in at a trim one thousand pages (approximately four hundred pages shorter than the standard version), also features the survival of two characters—Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Petya Rostov—who die in the longer book. Along with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, War and Peace is frequently mentioned in polls as one of the greatest novels of all time.
