Wed 26th June
6.30-9pm
Please join us for a talk with Vladimir Sorokin and his translator, Max Lawton.
Earlier this year, NYRB Classics published two books by him: his novel Blue Lard and a collection of his short fiction, Red Pyramid and Other Stories, both translated by Max Lawton and available in English for the first time. Widely hailed as the Russian De Sade, Sorokin is one of the most radical and inventive voices in contemporary world literature. He writes as much in the tradition of the political dissident as in that of literary troublemakers such as Burroughs, Bataille, and Houellebecq. His second novel, The Queue (available as an NYRB Classic), was banned in the Soviet Union for satirizing socialist bureaucracy, and in post-Soviet Russia, he has continued his unflinching indictment of Russian authoritarianism.
Originally published in 1999, Blue Lard is Sorokin’s most notorious book. Featuring a graphic sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev, Blue Lard led to pornography charges against Sorokin, and inspired pro-Putin protestors to throw the author’s books into a gigantic makeshift toilet in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Now, 25 years later, English readers can finally experience Sorokin’s phantasmagorical, boundary-defying romp through Russian literature and alternative twentieth-century history.
Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas but later turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. In 1992, Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature.
Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. He has translated several works by Vladimir Sorokin, including the NYRB Classics edition of Telluria.