Vladimir Sorokin

Although a blizzard prevents his cousins from visiting for his birthday, a disappointed Billy ends up having a very special day when his teacher and classmates must stay overnight at his family's house to wait out the snowstorm.

This is a classic work of contemporary Russian literature that blends the lines between mysticism and reality. It is a love story about the mysteries of nature and man's place in our constantly changing, unpredictable world.

"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.

anthology of erotic passages in classic literature

Imagines a New Russia of the near future that is ruled by a reconstituted nobility and which blends draconian codes with modern technology while locking down Western borders, a region in which a twenty-years-older Vladimir Putin has appropriated all freeenterprise.