Author: Vladimir Sorokin
Translator: Max Lawton
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Paperback
Staff Pick!
Dan says… "One of the pleasures of the increasing availability of Vladimir Sorokin’s fiction in English is the slow and steady unveiling of his literary project. With the release of Telluria (2013), a typically schizoid depiction of a world Balkanized by postmodernity (think Calvino on Krokodil), Sorokin reveals a fictional world first built in his earlier books the Blizzard and Day of the Oprichnik. This, then, is the project: a fantastic, neofascist, crack-addled sci-fi post-Sovietism; the “Vladimir Putin Cinematic Universe”. Its cast, from holy fools to neo-Tsarist boyars, are united by their slavering obsession for the drug Tellurium, which functions as a cipher for fiction itself. Essential reading."