Victor Pelevin - Böcker

As a poet, Tartarsky is a failure. As a copywriter for one of Moscow's biggest advertising firms he makes $2,000 in ten minutes - and that's before the cocaine kicks in. But as Tartarsky speeds through a surreal world of PR mercenaries, back-door deals and Zen Buddhism, he begins to suspect the disturbing truth behind it all - as suggested to him by the disembodied voice of Che Guevara. Babylon confirms Victor Pelevin's reputation as the funniest and sharpest observer of the chaos and absurdity of post-Soviet Russian life.

Victor Pelevin's unforgettable first novel, Omon Ra, is the story of a young man who always dreamt of becoming the ultimate Russian hero, a cosmonaut in the mould of Yuri Gagarin. Enrolling as a cadet at the Zaraisk flying school, it is not long before he is chosen to be the sole pilot of a mission - to the dark side of the moon.'An inventive comedy as black as outer space itself. Makes The Right Stuff look like a NASA handout.' Tibor Fischer

Set in a crumbling Soviet Black Sea resort, The Life of Insects with its motley cast of characters who exist simultaneously as human beings (racketeers, mystics, drug addicts and prostitutes) and as insects, extended the surreal comic range for which Pelevin's first novel Omon Ra was acclaimed by critics. With consummate literary skill Pelevin creates a satirical bestiary which is as realistic as it is delirious - a bitter parable of contemporary Russia, full of the probing, disenchanted comedy that makes Pelevin a vital and altogether surprising writer.

The short stories of Victor Pelevin are as individual, reality-warping and endlessly inventive as his novels, moving effortlessly between different genres and moods, bursting with absurd wit and existential satire. In The Blue Lantern he brings together sex-change prostitutes, melancholy animals and a cabinful of young boys obsessed by death. Sidestepping the world we take for granted, these stories show in miniature the fantastical talent for which the Observer acclaimed Pelevin's work as 'the real thing, fiction of world class'.

The Clay Machine-Gun is a novel rich in hilarious paradox. Pelevin himself has described it as 'the first novel in world literature which takes place in an absolute void'. Controversially denied the Russian Booker Prize - the Jury President branded it as a kind of 'computer virus designed to destroy the cultural memory' - the book became a huge cult success in Russia.The Clay Machine-Gun is a nightmarish fantasy about identity, crime and Russian history. The action cuts deliriously between present-day Moscow and 1919, the era of the Civil War, in which the narrator finds himself serving as a commissar in the division of the legendary commander Vasily Chapaev, and his formidable machine-gunner sidekick, Anna. Hailed as the greatest Russian novel of the post-Soviet era, The Clay Machine-Gun confirmed Victor Pelevin's status as one of the brightest stars in the Russian literary firmament.

The main character, Andrei, is a passenger aboard the Yellow Arrow, who begins to despair over the trains ultimate destination and looks for a way out as the chapters count down. Indifferent to their fate, the other passengers carry on as usual — trading in nickel melted down fro the carriage doors, attending the Upper Bunk avant-garde theatre, and leafing through Pasternak’s Early Trains. Pelevin's art lies in the ease with which he shifts from precisely imagined science fiction to lyrical meditations on past and future. And, because he is a natural storyteller with a wonderfully absurd imagination. The Yellow Arrow is full of the ridiculous and the sublime. It is a reflective story, chilling and gripping.

Victor Pelevin's novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: "full of the ridiculous and the sublime," says The Observer [London]. Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. However, he enrolls only to encounter the terrifying absurdity of Soviet protocol and its backward technology: a bicycle-powered moonwalker; the outrageous Colonel Urgachin ("a kind of Sovier Dr. Strangelove"—The New York Times); and a one-way assignment to the moon. The New Yorker proclaimed: "Omon's adventure is like a rocket firing off its various stages—each incident is more jolting and propulsively absurd than the one before."

In a recent New York Times Magazine feature article, Victor Pelevin was cited as "almost alone among his generation of Russian novelists in speaking with a voice authentically his own, and in trying to write about Russian life in its current idiom." Since the publication of this collection of stories, The Blue Lantern, Pelevin's books have been translated into many languages, and Pelevin himself has been touted as a major world writer. The Blue Lantern, winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, gathers eight of his very best stories. Various, delightful, and uncategorizable, the stories are highly addictive. Pelevin here, as in The Yellow Arrow (New Directions, 1996), Omon Ra (ND, 1997), and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia (ND, 1998), pays great attention to the meaning of life, in earnest and as spoof. In the title story, kids in a Pioneer camp tell terrifying bedtime stories; in "Hermit and Six-Toes," two chickens are obsessed with the nature of the universe as viewed from their poultry plant; the Young Communist League activists of "Mid-Game" change their sex to become hard-currency prostitutes; and "The Life and Adventures of Shed #XII" is the story of a storage hut whose dream is to become a bicycle.

Four stories by one of the most popularand critically controversialyoung writers to emerge from post-Glasnost Russia. "Hermit and Six Toes"; "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream"; "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII"; and "Tai Shou Chuan USSR" are four characterstic stories by the young Russian virtuoso Victor Pelevin, here collected in a New Directions Bibelot edition. With a deadpan and cooly ironic voice that speaks of the phantasmagorical, the surreal, the grotesque and the absurd just as affectingly as Gogol did in his day, Victor Pelevin writes of the dark chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a man walks through a city at night with a companion he isn't entirely sure isn't his own shadow. This slim volume offers first-time Pelevin readers a compelling taste of his bleakly comic genius.

Victor Pelevin is "the only young Russian novelist to have made an impression in the West" (Village Voice). A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, the second of Pelevin's Russian Booker Prize-winning short story collections, continues his Sputnik-like rise. The writers to whom he is frequently compared—Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller—are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires in society's deadening protocol."At the very start of the third semester, in one of the lectures on Marxism-Leninism, Nikita Dozakin made a remarkable discovery," begins the story "Sleep." Nikita's discovery is that everyone around him, from parents to television talk-show hosts, is actually asleep. In "Vera Pavlova's Ninth Dream," the attendant in a public toilet finds that her researches into solipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. In the title story, a young Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forest who can transform themselves into wolves. As Publishers Weekly noted, "Pelevin's allegories are reminiscent of children's fairy tales in their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary souls tossed helplessly among them." Pelevin—whom Spin called "a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human"—carries us in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia to a land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.

After auditioning for the part as a singing geisha at a dubious bar, Lena and eleven other “lucky” girls are sent to work at a posh underground nightclub reserved exclusively for Russia’s upper-crust elite. They are to be a sideshow attraction to the rest of the club’s entertainment, and are billed as the “famous singing caryatids.” Things only get weirder from there. Secret ointments, praying mantises, sexual escapades, and grotesque murder are quickly ushered into the plot. The Russian literary master Victor Pelevin holds nothing back, and The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, his most recent story to be translated into English, is sure to make you squirm in your seat with utter delight.

Damilola Karpov is a pilot. Living in Byzantium, a huge sky city floating above the land of Urkaine, he makes his living as a drone pilot - capable of being a cameraman who records the events unfolding in Urkaine or, with the weapons aboard his drone, of making a newsworthy event happen for his employers: 'Big Byz Media'.His recordings are known as S.N.U.F.F.: Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film.S.N.U.F.F. is a superb post-apocalyptic novel, exploring the conflict between the nation of Urkaine, its causes and its relationship with the city 'Big Byz' above. Contrasting poverty and luxury, low and high technology, barbarity and civilisation - while asking questions about the nature of war, the media, entertainment and humanity.