Publisher Description

Pelevin's short stories are as individual, reality-warping and endlessly inventive as his novels, moving effortlessly between different genres and moods, bursting with absurd wit and existential satire. In The Blue Lantern he brings together sex-change prostitutes, melancholy animals and a cabinful of young boys obsessed by death. Sidestepping the world we take for granted, these stories show in miniature the fantastical talent for which the Observer acclaimed Pelevin's work as 'the real thing, fiction of world class'.

Notes

Collection of short stories from the winner of the Russian "Little-Booker" prize which is published to coincide with the B format paperback Babylon. His raw, fresh style has received glowing reviews and there should be much broadsheet coverage as well as radio features.

Author Biography

Born in 1962 in Moscow, Victor Pelevin has swiftly been recognised as the leading Russian novelist of the new generation. Before studying at Moscow's Gorky Institute of Literature, he worked in a number of jobs, including as an engineer on a project to protect MiG fighter planes from insect interference in tropical conditions. One of the few novelists today who writes seriously about what is happening in contemporary Russia, he has, according to the New York Times, 'the kind of mordant, astringent turn of mind that in the pre-glasnost era landed writers in psychiatric hospitals or exile'.His work has been translated into fifteen languages and his novels Omon Ra, The Life of Insects, The Clay Machine-Gun and Babylon, and two collections of short stories, The Blue Lantern (winner of the Russian 'Little Booker' Prize) and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, have been published in English to great acclaim.Victor Pe

Promotional

The Blue Lantern by Victor Pelevin is a collection of short stories which sidestep the world we take for granted, to tumble around the unconscious, bursting with absurd wit and existential satire.

Kirkus UK Review

A collection of short stories that seek to question the nature of reality. From prostitutes and engineers to, most farcically, chickens plotting their escape from slaughter on a broiler farm, Pelevin's protagonists throw up ideas at once bizarre, funny and philosophical. Winner of the Russian 'Little Booker' prize for the best new fiction by a Russian writer. (Kirkus UK)

Long Description

Pelevin's short stories are as individual, reality-warping and endlessly inventive as his novels, moving effortlessly between different genres and moods, bursting with absurd wit and existential satire. In The Blue Lantern he brings together sex-change prostitutes, melancholy animals and a cabinful of young boys obsessed by death. Sidestepping the world we take for granted, these stories show in miniature the fantastical talent for which the Observer acclaimed Pelevin's work as 'the real thing, fiction of world class'.

Promotional "Headline"

The Blue Lantern by Victor Pelevin is a collection of short stories which sidestep the world we take for granted, to tumble around the unconscious, bursting with absurd wit and existential satire.

Details