Nervous People and Other Satires

Author	Ilya Ilf
ISBN	0810114844

Ostap Bender is an unemployed con artist living by his wits in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia. He joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to find a cache of missing jewels which were hidden in some chairs that have been appropriated by...

Author	Clifford D. Simak
ISBN	0020248717

Enoch Wallace is an ageless hermit, striding across his untended farm as he has done for over a century, still carrying the gun with which he had served in the Civil War. But what his neighbors must never know is that, inside his unchanging house, he meets with a host of unimaginable friends from the farthest...

Author	Yury Olesha
ISBN	1590170865

One of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha's novella brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of...

Author

Mikhail Lermontov

In its adventurous happenings, its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues, A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and '30s. In the character of its protagonist, Pechorin, the archetypal Russian antihero, Lermontov's...

Author	Tatyana Tolstaya
ISBN	1590171969

Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza,...

Author	Venedikt Erofeev
ISBN	0810112000

Maybe the best book about Brezhnev's Russia imaginable. If you are the kind of person who has ever got drunk with friends, stormed a police station and then declared war on Norway then you will find much here that is familiar.

It's a book rich in allusion starting from the title (Moscow to Petushki)...

Author	Victor Pelevin
ISBN	0811213641

Victor Pelevin's novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: "full of the ridiculous and the sublime," says The Observer [London]. Omon is chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program the fulfillment of his lifelong...

Author	Sergei Dovlatov
ISBN	0897333535

A very different read than my usual book. This is a collection of newspaper articles written in Estonia during the late 1970s, each followed by a longer description, often satirical (intended? or otherwise) which provides the true background of the articles. Through this the reader sees a sample of...

Author	Mark Twain
ISBN	0812971183

This unique collection of Twain’s essential short stories and semiautobiographical narratives is a testament to the author’s vast imagination. Featuring popular tales such as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” as well as some delightful excerpts...

Author	Harry Harrison
ISBN	0005530522

Jim was left in the custody of the League Navy, this story opens with him escaping from his prison cell on the League base on Steren-Gwandra, where he is awaiting deportation back to his home world. He has discovered that Bibs, a crew girl from Captain Garth's ship, is also a prisoner. Jim holds Garth responsible...

Author

Alexander Pushkin

You can learn important things about a great writer by reading other great writers who have imitated him. I learned about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn by reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, I learned about Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur by reading...