Red Pyramid by Vladimir Sorokin

Extended comic turns like The Queue and relentless, mind-bending, genre-shredding extravaganzas like Ice Trilogy have established Vladimir Sorokin as a master of the contemporary novel. It is to Sorokin’s short fiction, however, that readers must turn to encounter the wildest and most unsettling of his inventions and provocations. Sorokin is a virtuoso of parody and pastiche, as well as  a poet of the black sites where the human soul stands exposed to its own incontinent desires, and Red Pyramid spans the whole of his career, from his emergence in  the Soviet Union as a member of Moscow’s artistic underground to his late preeminence as an observer and interpreter of the Putin era, with its squalid parade of gruesome folly and unhinged violence. Included here  are queasy tour-de-forces, like the early “Obelisk,” a story as scatological as it is conceptual; the notorious “A Month in Dachau,” which earned Sorokin his sobriquet as the Russian Sade; and profoundly unsettling texts like “Tiny Tim,” where tenderness is inseparable from horror.

Sorokin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and The Baffler. This is the first time they have been collected in English.

REVIEWS

"If reality is said to be stranger than fiction, Sorokin’s fiction goes further, to make the point that the pornographic, as he writes it, is a way of bearing witness to the past and present...These stories are not for the faint-hearted. Reading them is like waking violently from a deep sleep—and the shock continues to haunt one." —The Spectator

"The Sorokin renaissance continues after Telluria with a vital selection of the Russian enfant terrible’s best shorts....As astute as they are provocative, these stories are an ideal introduction to the prolific and fearless Sorokin." —Publishers Weekly

“Extravagant, remarkable, politically and socially devastating, the tone and style without precedent, the parables merciless, the nightmares beyond outrance, the violence unparalleled, these stories, translated with fearless agility by Max Lawton, showcase the great novelist Vladimir Sorokin at his divinely disturbing best.” —Joy Williams

PRODUCT DETAILS
Trade Paperback
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 978-1681378206
Pages: 320