Viktor Olegovich Pelevin

Elisabeth is a woman whose curiosity and passion far exceed the borders of her quiet middle-class life. She befriends a neighbor, organizes a small dinner party. And then, quite suddenly, finds herself embarked with him on an adventure that is one part vaudeville and one part high tragedy. A quiet novel of manners turns into a police procedural thriller. Her motivations for risking everything she has are never transparent. In a world where matters of life and death are nearly always transported to a clinical setting, whether it be a hospital or a courtroom, here each character must confront them unassisted.

A satire about the Soviet space program finds Omon, who has dreamed of space flight all of his life, enrolled as a cosmonaut only to learn that his task will be piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar vehicle to the Moon and remaining there to die.

191p. ; 21cm

From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, a full-frontal Triple X novel that goes where no American work of fiction has gone before Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly, and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax?

They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms which open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue which they cannot escape - a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. Victor Pelevin has created a mesmerising world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide. "The Helmet of Horror" is structured according to the internet exchanges of the twenty first century, radically reinventing the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.

A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, the second of Pelevin's Russian Booker Prize-winning short story collections, continues his Sputnik-like rise. The writers to whom he is frequently compared - Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller - are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires in society's deadening protocol. "At the very start of the third semester, in one of the lectures on Marxism-Leninism, Nikita Dozakin made a remarkable discovery," begins the story "Sleep." Nikita's discovery is that everyone around him, from parents to television talk-show hosts, is actually asleep. In "Vera Pavlova's Ninth Dream," the attendant in a public toilet finds her researches into solipsism have dire and diabolical consequences.

"We first encounter Pyotr Voyd, the hero of Buddha's Little Finger, during the Russian Civil War of 1919, when, through a strange sequence of events, he finds himself serving as commissar to the legendary Bolshevik commander Chapaev, and falling in love with his machine-gunner sidekick, Anna. But who is the Pyotr Voyd who finds himself incarcerated among a group of patients in a contemporary Moscow psychiatric hospital? And who is the Chapaev who issues maddeningly metaphysical dialogues on the virtues of the void and the illusory nature of reality? And where does Arnold Schwarzenegger fit into all this?"--BOOK JACKET.

Set in a crumbling resort hotel on the Black Sea, the novel follows the misadventures of the Russian duo Arnold and Arthur and the khaki-clad Sam, a visiting American. The twist is that these characters are depicted alternately as human beings and as insects: now they are humans with buggy qualities; now they are insects that walk and talk. As they forage, quarrel, joke, and suck blood in the squalid rooms of the old hotel - and on the bodies of their hosts - they invariably get into trouble. In one chapter, a couple of hemp bugs suddenly find themselves being smoked in somebody else's pipe; in another, two moths flitting around a streetlight discuss the meaning of life in Beckett-like dialogue.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up a vast market ripe for exploitation. Everybody wants a piece of the action. But how do you sell things to a generation that grew up with just one brand of cola? Enter Tartarsky, the hero of Homo Zapiens, a lowly shop assistant who is hired as an advertising copywriter and discovers a hidden talent for devising home-grown alternatives to Western ads. Tartarsky is propelled into a world of gangsters, spin doctors, and drug dealers, fueled by cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms. But as his fortunes soar, reality soon loosens its grip. Who is the boss - man or his television set? When advertisers talk about "twisting reality," do they mean it quite literally? And what exactly does go on at the Institute of Apiculture?"--BOOK JACKET.

In the title story, kids in a Pioneer camp tell terrifying bedtime stories; in "Hermit and Six-Toes," two chickens are obsessed with the nature of the universe as viewed from their poultry plant; the young communist league activists of "Mid-Game" change their sex to become hard-currency prostitutes; and "The Life and Adventures of Shed #XII" is the story of a storage hut whose dream is to become a bicycle.