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The Sacred Book of the Werewolf: A Novel
Paranormal meets transcendental in this provocative and hilarious novel. Victor Pelevin has established a reputation as one of the most brilliant writers at work today; his comic inventiveness has won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, and Gogol, and Time has described him as a “psychedelic Nabokov for the cyberage.” Pelevin’s new novel, his first in six years, is both a supernatural love story and a satirical portrait of modern Russia. It concerns the adventures of a hardworking fifteen-year-old Moscow prostitute named A. Huli, who in reality is a two thousand-year-old were-fox who seduces men in order to absorb their life force; she does this by means of her tail, a hypnotic organ that puts men into a trance in which they dream they are having sex with her. A. Huli eventually comes to the attention of and falls in love with a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer named Alexander, who is also a werewolf (unbeknownst to our heroine). And that is only the beginning of the fun. A huge success in Russia, this is a stunning and ingenious work of the imagination, arguably Pelevin’s sharpest and most engrossing novel to date..
Price: $12.90
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Buddha's Little Finger
"Structurally cunning and delightfully intense . . . a work of rare intelligence and bite." ( San Francisco Chronicle Book Review ) Russian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber-age." In his third novel, Buddha's Little Finger, Pelevin has created an intellectually dazzling tale about identity and Russian history, as well as a spectacular elaboration of Buddhist philosophy. Moving between events of the Russian Civil War of 1919 and the thoughts of a man incarcerated in a contemporary Moscow psychiatric hospital, Buddha's Little Finger is a work of demonic absurdism by a writer who continues to delight and astonish..
Price: $8.67
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Omon Ra
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Homo Zapiens
The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up a huge consumer market, but how do you sell things to a generation that grew up with just one type of cola? When Tatarsky, a frustrated poet, takes a job as an advertising copywriter, he finds he has a talent for putting distinctively Russian twists on Western-style ads. But his success leads him into a surreal world of spin doctors, gangsters, drug trips, and the spirit of Che Guevera, who, by way of a Ouija board, communicates theories of consumer theology. A bestseller in Russia, Homo Zapiens displays the biting absurdist satire that has gained Victor Pelevin superstar status among today's Russian youth, disapproval from the conservative Moscow literary world, and critical acclaim worldwide. .
Price: $6.89
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A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories
Stories by the renowned Russian wizard. 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..
Price: $11.99
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The Blue Lantern: Stories
Victor Pelevin's highly acclaimed story collection now available in paperback. The Blue Lantern, winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, gathers eight of Victor Pelevin's 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 "Hermits 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 Number XII" is the story of a storage hut whose dream is to become a bicycle. .
Price: $8.95
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The Yellow Arrow
Set during the advent of perestroika, a surreal, satirical novella by a critically acclaimed young Russian writer traces the fate of the passengers on The Yellow Arrow, a long-distance Russian train headed for a ruined bridge..
Price: $10.53
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The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (Myths, The)
Victor Pelevin, the iconoclastic and wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. By creating a mesmerizing world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide, The Helmet of Horror is a radical retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur set in an Internet chat room. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue they cannot escape — a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first century — using the Internet — yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents this myth for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable. .
Price: $7.49
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The Life of Insects
In a sophisticated display of allegory, fantasy, and philosophical inquiry, Victor Pelevin creates an Ovidian, shape-shifting world that never fails to resonate on various strata with our own. The Life of Insects opens with a trio of investors--two Russians and one American--discussing business prospects in the Crimea, when, suddenly, they reveal themselves to be mosquitoes in search of hemoglobin and glucose. Other figures morph from human to insect (and back again) in this thoroughly disorienting yet strangely familiar Kafkaesque novel. Both a parody of traditional Russian prose and a savage commentary of post-Soviet culture, The Life of Insects is a triumphant act of storytelling that succeeds in making "insect aspirations and anxiety feel so fragile and so soberingly universal" (The New York Times Book Review)..
Price: $41.99
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