Download or read book Blue Lard written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to toss shredded copies of Sorokin’s books into an enormous papier-mâché toilet—this ferocious takedown of Russian greatness has since found its way into the canon of Russian literature itself. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese. There they work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Max Lawton’s translation of Blue Lard, the first into English, captures this key work in all its grotesque, havoc-making, horrifying, visceral intensity.
Download or read book The Queue written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vladimir Sorokin’s first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet “years of stagnation.” Thousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn’t matter–if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin’s tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on."--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Blizzard written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this short, surreal twist on the classic Russian novel, a doctor travels to a distant village to save its citizens from an epidemic, but a metaphysical snowstorm gets in his way"--
Download or read book Ice Trilogy written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Review Books Original In 1908, deep in Siberia, it fell to earth. THEIR ICE. A young man on a scientific expedition found it. It spoke to his heart, and his heart named him Bro. Bro felt the Ice. Bro knew its purpose. To bring together the 23,000 blond, blue-eyed Brothers and Sisters of the Light who were scattered on earth. To wake their sleeping hearts. To return to the Light. To destroy this world. And secretly, throughout the twentieth century and up to our own day, the Children of the Light have pursued their beloved goal. Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.
Download or read book Russian Literature since 1991 written by Evgeny Dobrenko and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian Literature since 1991 is the first comprehensive, single-volume compendium of modern scholarship on post-Soviet Russian literature. The volume encompasses broad, complex and diverse sources of literary material - from ideological and historical novels to experimental prose and poetry, from nonfiction to drama. Written by an international team of leading experts on contemporary Russian literature and culture, it presents a broad panorama of genres in post-Soviet literature such as postmodernism, magical historicism, hyper-naturalism (in drama), and the new lyricism. At the same time, it offers close readings of the most prominent works published in Russia since the end of the Soviet regime and elimination of censorship. The collection highlights the interdisciplinary context of twenty-first-century Russian literature and can be widely used both for research and teaching by specialists in and beyond Russian studies, including those in post-Cold War and post-communist world history, literary theory, comparative literature and cultural studies.
Download or read book Their Four Hearts written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many respects, Their Four Hearts is a book of endings and final things. Vladimir Sorokin wrote it in the year the Soviet Union collapsed and then didn’t write fiction for ten years after completing it––his next book being the infamous Blue Lard, which he wrote in 1998. Without exaggerating too much, one might call it the last book of the Russian twentieth century and Blue Lard the first book of the Russian twenty-first century. It is a novel about the failure of the Soviet Union, about its metaphysical designs, and about the violence it produced, but presented as God might see it or Bataille might write it. Their Four Hearts follows the violent and nonsensical missions carried out by a group of four characters who represent Socialist Realist archetypes: Seryozha, a naive and optimistic young boy; Olga, a dedicated female athlete; Shtaube, a wise old man; and Rebrov, a factory worker and a Stakhanovite embodying Soviet manhood. However, the degradation inflicted upon them is hardly a Socialist Realist trope. Are the acts of violence they carry out a more realistic vision of what the Soviet Union forced its “heroes” to live out? A corporealization and desacralization of self-sacrificing acts of Soviet heroism? How the Soviet Union truly looked if you were to strip away the ideological infrastructure? As we see in the long monologues Shtaube performs for his companions––some of which are scatological nonsense and some of which are accurate reproductions of Soviet language––Sorokin is interested in burrowing down to the libidinal impulses that fuel a totalitarian system and forcing the reader to take part in them in a way that isn’t entirely devoid of aesthetic pleasure. As presented alongside Greg Klassen’s brilliant charcoal illustrations, which have been compared to the work of Bruno Schulz by Alexander Genis and the work of Ralph Steadman as filtered through Francis Bacon by several gallerists, this angular work of fiction becomes a scatological storybook-world that the reader is dared to immerse themselves in.
Download or read book Telluria written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the warring, neo-feudal society of this cross-genre novel for fans of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson, the greatest treasure is a dose of tellurium—a magical drug administered by a spike through the brain. Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere is the appetite for the special substance tellurium. A spike of tellurium, driven into the brain by an expert hand, offers a transforming experience of bliss; incorrectly administered, it means death. The fifty chapters of Telluria map out this brave new world from fifty different angles, as Vladimir Sorokin, always a virtuoso of the word, introduces us to, among many other figures, partisans and princes, peasants and party leaders, a new Knights Templar, a harem of phalluses, and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. The book is an immense and sumptuous tapestry of the word, carnivalesque and cruel, and Max Lawton, Sorokin’s gifted translator, has captured it in an English that carries the charge of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson.
Download or read book Other Russias written by B. Baer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the unprecedented explosion of homosexual discourse in post-Soviet Russia and details how homosexuality has come to signify a surprising and often contradictory array of uniquely post-Soviet concerns.
Download or read book In the Eye of the Wild written by Nastassja Martin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After enduring a vicious bear attack in the Russian Far East's Kamchatka Peninsula, a French anthropologist undergoes a physical and spiritual transformation that forces her to confront the tenuous distinction between animal and human. In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with. Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear. In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker’s classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being.
Download or read book Day of the Oprichnik written by Vladimir Sorokin and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books 2011 Moscow, 2028. A cold, snowy morning. Andrei Danilovich Komiaga is fast asleep. A scream, a moan, and a death rattle slowly pull him out of his drunken stupor—but wait, that's just his ring tone. And so begins another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the czar's most trusted courtiers—and one of the country's most feared men. Welcome to the new New Russia, where futuristic technology and the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible are in perfect synergy. Corporal punishment is back, as is a divine monarch, but these days everyone gets information from high-tech news bubbles, and the elite get high on hallucinogenic, genetically modified fish. Over the course of one day, Andrei Komiaga will bear witness to—and participate in—brutal executions; extravagant parties; meetings with ballerinas, soothsayers, and even the czarina. He will rape and pillage, and he will be moved to tears by the sweetly sung songs of his homeland. He will consume an arsenal of drugs and denounce threats to his great nation's morals. And he will fall in love—perhaps even with a number of his colleagues. Vladimir Sorokin, the man described by Keith Gessen (in The New York Review of Books) as "[the] only real prose writer, and resident genius" of late-Soviet fiction, has imagined a near future both too disturbing to contemplate and too realistic to dismiss. But like all of his best work, Sorokin's new novel explodes with invention and dark humor. A startling, relentless portrait of a troubled and troubling empire, Day of the Oprichnik is at once a richly imagined vision of the future and a razor-sharp diagnosis of a country in crisis.
Download or read book Overkill written by Eliot Borenstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borenstein argues that the popular cultural products consumed in the post-perestroika era were more than just diversions; they allowed Russians to indulge their despair over economic woes and everyday threats.
Download or read book Energy Culture written by Jillian Porter and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates energy as a shaping force in Russian and Soviet literature, visual culture, and social practice. Chronologically arranged chapters explain how nineteenth-century ideas about energy informed realist novels and paintings; how the poetics of energy defined pre-Revolutionary and Stalinist utopianism; and how fossil fuels, electricity, and nuclear fission generated distinct aesthetic features in Imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature, cinema, and landscape. The volume’s concentration on Russia responds to a clear need to understand the role the country plays in social, political, and economic processes endangering life on Earth today. The cultural dimension of Russia’s efforts at energy dominance deserves increased scholarly attention not only in its own right, but also because it directly affects global energy policy. As the contributors to this volume argue, the nationally inflected cultural myths that underlie human engagements with energy have been highly consequential in the Anthropocene.
Download or read book Praise the Lard written by Mike Mills and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Signature recipes and wisdom from the country's foremost pitmaster Mike Mills and Amy Mills, the dynamic father-daughter duo behind the famous 17th Street Barbecue, are two of the most influential people in barbecue. Known as “The Legend,” Mike is a Barbecue Hall-of-Famer, a four-time barbecue World Champion, a three-time Grand World Champion at Memphis in May (the Super Bowl of Swine), and a founder of the Big Apple Block Party. A third-generation barbecuer, Amy is the marketing mind behind the business, a television personality, and industry expert. Praise the Lard, named after the Mills' popular Southern Illinois cook-off, now in its thirtieth year, dispenses all the secrets of the family’s lifetime of worshipping at the temple of barbecue. At the heart of the book are almost 100 recipes from the family archives: Private Reserve Mustard Sauce, Ain’t No Thang but a Chicken Wing, Pork Belly Bites, and Prime Rib on the Pit, Tangy Pit Beans, and Blackberry Pie. With hundreds food photos, candids, and illustrations, this book is as rich as the Mills’ history.
Download or read book By products of the Meat Packing Industry written by American Meat Institute. Committee on Textbooks and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Autobiography of a Corpse written by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the 2014 PEN Translation Prize Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.
Download or read book Pop Culture Russia written by Birgit Beumers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-06-21 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at contemporary Russian popular culture, exploring the historical and social influences that make it unique. Pop music is only one aspect of contemporary Russian culture that has taken some unexpected turns in the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. Television and advertising, theater and cinema, athletics and religion, even fashion and food now reflect more exposure to the West, yet remain in essence distinctively Russian. Pop Culture Russia! introduces readers to the fascinating, often surprising, post-Soviet cultural landscape. With chapters on media, the arts, recreation, religion, and consumerism, the book offers an insightful survey of Russian mass culture from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the present, exploring the historical significance of important events and trends, as well as the social and political contexts from which they emerged.
Download or read book Laggan Lard Butts written by Eric Walters and published by Orca Book Publishers. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Campbell's school team, the Laggan Lairds, always loses. When someone suggests that their name be the Laggan Lard Butts, Sam thinks the team should change its name. What is a Laird anyway? The basketball coach agrees, and soon the whole school is involved in an election for a new team name. Sam and his friends nominate the name Lard Butts. When the basketball team starts winning games after a warm-up cheer of "Go Lard Butts!" it seems the Lard Butt campaign might actually win the election. This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for middle-grade readers who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read!
