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"A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia," the second of Pelevin's Russian Booker Prize-winning short-story collection, continues his Sputnik-like rise. Armed with absurd wit and his own brand of existential satire, Pelevin faces the ideological decay of the Soviet empire square on. The writers to whom Pelevin is frequent compared--Philip K. Dick and Platonov (by the New York Times Book Review); Kafka, Bulgakov, Joseph Heller (by the Village Voice)--are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires in society's deadening protocol. In these stories we find everyone from a student who realizes that everyone in his life, from professors to police, is actually asleep; to a drunk Chinese peasant who is spirited to the Kremlin, named the supreme "Comrade Salami," and then deposed for suggesting that all of Moscow's streets might not quite exist. As Richard Bernstein wrote in The New York Times, "Pelevin carries his satire about as far as satire can go." Pelevin carries us in "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" to a land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.

"[Pelevin's stories] gnaw at our confidence in conventional reality, like a dog worrying a bone."

New York Times Book Review

"Each of the eight new stories in 'A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia' is, in essence a dream of an alternate reality. All of them, improbably or not, are supported by daily events in Russian life."

Clark Blaise, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 02/21/1999

A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories: Search Results