Extended comic turns like The Queue and relentless, mind-bending, genre-shredding extravaganzas like Ice Trilogy have established Vladimir Sorokin as a master of the contemporary novel. It is to Sorokin’s short fiction, however, that readers must turn to encounter the wildest and most unsettling of his inventions and provocations. Sorokin is a virtuoso of parody and pastiche, as well as a poet of the black sites where the human soul stands exposed to its own incontinent desires, and Red Pyramid spans the whole of his career, from his emergence in the Soviet Union as a member of Moscow’s artistic underground to his late preeminence as an observer and interpreter of the Putin era, with its squalid parade of gruesome folly and unhinged violence. Included here are queasy tour-de-forces, like the early “Obelisk,” a story as scatological as it is conceptual; the notorious “A Month in Dachau,” which earned Sorokin his sobriquet as the Russian Sade; and profoundly unsettling texts like “Tiny Tim,” where tenderness is inseparable from horror.
Sorokin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and The Baffler. This is the first time they have been collected in English.
- ISBN10 1681378205
- ISBN13 9781681378206
- Publish Date 27 February 2024
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc
- Imprint NYRB Classics
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 320
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781681378206