Victor Pelevin

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The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Victor Pelevin

A darkly comic work by the author of Buddha's Little Finger finds fifteen-year-old Moscow prostitute A. Huli hiding her identity as a two-thousand-year-old were-fox who seduces men to absorb their life force, a practice that catches the attention of a high-ranking intelligence officer and fellow werewolf. Simultaneous.

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El Menique De Buda

Victor Pelevin

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Omon Ra

Victor Pelevin

OMON RA, by the gifted Russian writer Victor Pelevin, is a pointed, dead-on satire of the now-defunct Soviet space program, and a moving account of a cosmonaut's coming-of-age.The story is told in the beguiling voice of its young protagonist, Omon Ra, whose odd name combines a term for the Soviet special forces with the name of the sun god in Egyptian mythology. Ever since he was a boy, Omon has dreamed of flying in space. He enrolls in a training program for cosmonauts, only to learn that his first assignment will also be his last. For although the Soviet space program claims to carry out its missions with unmanned rockets, its scientists haven't yet mastered the necessary technology; so Omon is to drive a supposedly unmanned landing vehicle across the moon's surface, put in place a device that will emit the words of Lenin into space, and then remain on the moon, abandoned, until he dies.The voyage that results combines the absurdity of Soviet protocol with the wonder and pathos of space flight. As told in Pelevin's artful prose, the story of Omon's ill-fated trip to the moon has the nimbleness and buoyancy of the best contemporary Western fiction as well as the sting of great Russian satire.Victor Pelevin has swiftly been recognized as the leading Russian novelist of the post-glasnost era, and OMON RA introduces him to American readers as a brilliant, funny, original writer.

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Other editions: Softcover - 2003, 1999, 1999, Softcover - 1994, 1993

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A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories

Victor Pelevin

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.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1998

Homo Zapiens

Victor Pelevin

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2002

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Grand Street: Against Nature

Victor Pelevin; Edward W. Said; Daniel Barenboim; Kiki Smith; Durs Grunbein

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Buddha's Little Finger

Victor Pelevin

Leading St. Petersburg poet Pyotr Void finds himself in the midst of the 1919 civil war in Russia when he serves as commissar to legendary Bolshevik commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev and his gunner, Anna, who possesses a strange secret. Reprint.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2000

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Life of Insects

Victor Pelevin; Viktor Pelevin; Andrew Bromfield

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).

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