The Blue Lantern: Stories

The Blue Lantern: Stories

• Used Book in Good Condition

In a recent <em>New York Times Magazine</em> feature article, Victor Pelevin was cited as "almost alone among his generation of Russian novelists in speaking with a voice authentically his own, and in trying to write about Russian life in its current idiom." Since the publication of this collection of stories, <em>The Blue Lantern</em>, Pelevin's books have been translated into many languages, and Pelevin himself has been touted as a major world writer. <em>The Blue Lantern</em>, winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, gathers eight of his very best stories. Various, delightful, and uncategorizable, the stories are highly addictive. Pelevin here, as in <em>The Yellow Arrow</em> (New Directions, 1996), <em>Omon Ra</em> (ND, 1997), and <em>A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia</em> (ND, 1998), pays great attention to the meaning of life, in earnest and as spoof. 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.