Mevlido's Dreams

Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer who has published twenty books under this name, of which several are available in English translation: Minor Angels, Radiant Terminus, Bardo or Not Bardo, Writers, and Solo Viola (Minnesota, 2021). Gina Stamm is assistant professor of French at the University of Alabama.

"Certainly the strangest and arguably one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of fiction in French, Antoine Volodine has created a vast and perplexing universe of bad dreams in several dozen works under a variety of pseudonyms over the past forty years. Some kind of disaster has occurred, the revolution has long since turned into a nightmare, yet people resist as best they can-by telling stories to each other, which are stories about each other. Mevlido’s Dreams provides a new pathway into Volodine’s labyrinth, which for all the horrors it recounts is always cast in stylishly crafted prose." -David Bellos, Princeton University   "Translator Stamm does an admirable job of rendering Volodine’s serpentine prose in English, and the noirish, surrealist story turns into an unlikely romp as it riffs on the absurdity of 20th-century political institutions and pop culture."-Publishers Weekly   "Mevlido’s Dreams is highly readable."-The Times Literary Supplement

• Contents Translator’s Introduction Part I. Mevlido’s Nights Part II. One of Mevlido’s Days Part III. Mevlido’s Lies Part IV. One of Mevlido’s Births Part V. One of Mevlido’s Deaths Part VI. Mevlido’s Dreams: The Shambles Part VII. Mevlido’s Dreams: Verena Becker