A School for Fools
10 best books like A School for Fools (Sasha Sokolov): White Walls: Collected Stories, Moscow 2042, Maidenhair, Summer in Baden-Baden, Pushkin House, Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, The Petty Demon, The Queue, Conquered City, The Galosh: And Other Stories
| Author | Tatyana Tolstaya |
| ISBN | 1590171977 |
Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories — with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair — established her in the 1980s as one of modern Russia's finest writers. Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O'Brien...
| Author | Vladimir Voinovich |
| ISBN | 0156621657 |
Welcome to dystopia, soviet-style. If you like your satire roasted to well-charred black comedy, this novel weighing in at over four hundred pages will be a memorable feast. I laughed so hard reading The Fur Hat, I wanted to laugh even harder – Moscow 2042 gave me the chance. Vladimir...
| Author | Mikhail Shishkin |
| ISBN | 1934824364 |
Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter—the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise—and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle...
| Author | Leonid Tsypkin |
| ISBN | 0811215482 |
Summer in Baden-Baden was acclaimed by The New York Review of Books as "a short poetic masterpiece" and by Donald Fanger in The Los Angeles Times as "gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving."
A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime,...
No other contemporary novel provides such clear insight into the Russian mind and way of life as Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House. First published in the United States in 1987 and highly praised for its inventiveness, Pushkin House is a contemporary literary masterpiece. Though the novel's focus is a...
Early in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen-name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 1930s, she wrote some of her finest...
| Author | Fyodor Sologub |
| ISBN | 0882338080 |
The Petty Demon is one of the funniest Russian novels. It is also the most decadent of the great Russian classics, replete with naked boys, sinuous girls, and a strange mixture of beauty and perversity. The main hero, Peredonov, is as comical as he is disgusting, he is at once a victim, a monster, a silly...
| Author | Vladimir Sorokin |
| ISBN | 1590172744 |
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...
| Author | Victor Serge |
| ISBN | 0904613518 |
1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting...
| Author | Mikhail Zoshchenko |
| ISBN | 1585676314 |
In his prime, satirist Mikhail Zoschenko was more widely read in the Soviet Union than either Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. His stories give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920's and `30s, beset by an acute housing shortage, ubiquitous...
Moscow in the 1930s is the consummate symbol of the Soviet paradise, a fairy-tale capital where, in Stalin's words, "life has become better, life has become merrier". In Happy Moscow Platonov exposes the gulf between this premature triumphalism and the harsh reality of low living standards and...
| Author | Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky |
Biography Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950) studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. His philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light, and three separate efforts to print different...
| Author | Vasily Grossman |
| ISBN | 1590176189 |
An NYRB Classics Original
Few writers had to confront as many of the last century’s mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman, who wrote with terrifying clarity about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. An Armenian Sketchbook, however, shows us a very different...
| Author | Yury Dombrovsky |
| ISBN | 1860463436 |
Dombrovsky's tale of an exiled intellectual who, in the far province of Alma-Ata, becomes an archeologist and is arrested and interrogated by a Stalinist prosecutor (who will later himself become a target of the Great Terror), is largely autobiographical. It is also vivid and courageous fiction,...
An NYRB Classics Original
The Prank is Chekhov’s own selection of the best of his early work, the first book he put together and the first book he hoped to publish. Assembled in 1882, with illustrations by Nikolay Chekhov, the book was then presented to the censor for approval—which was...
| Author | Georgi Vladimov |
| ISBN | 1935554670 |
Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” (The Guardian)
Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps...
| Author | Victor Shklovsky |
| ISBN | 1564783111 |
While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary...
| Author | Lyudmila Ulitskaya |
| ISBN | 5699099999 |
В этой книге нет тех претензий на серьезный разговор. Здесь локальная проблема взаимоотношений сына и матери, подчинение человека чувству долга и связанные...
An unsuccessful writer and an inveterate alcoholic, Boris Alikhanov has recently divorced his wife Tatyana, and he is running out of money. The prospect of a summer job as a tour guide at the Pushkin Hills Preserve offers him hope of regaining some balance in life as his wife makes plans to emigrate to...
