The Man with the Black Coat: Russia's Literature of the Absurd
10 best books like The Man with the Black Coat: Russia's Literature of the Absurd (Daniil Kharms): Selected Stories, Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, Selected Stories, The Noise of Time: Selected Prose, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories, The Silver Dove, Nervous People and Other Satires, On the Golden Porch, The Letter Killers Club, The Fierce and Beautiful World, OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism
| Author | Robert Walser |
| ISBN | 0940322986 |
How to place the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a humble genius who possessed one of the most elusive and surprising sensibilities in modern literature? Walser is many things: a Paul Klee in words, maker of droll, whimsical, tender, and heartbreaking verbal artifacts; an inspiration to such...
| Author | Nikolai Gogol |
| ISBN | 0140449078 |
Gogol's detailed, breathlessly sarcastic and mean spirited story telling is a joy to read.
Unfortunately some stories stop abruptly with no decent pay off for the gloriousness before it: The Carriage has an obvious and anti-climatic finale and The Government Inspector didn't finish as grandly...
| Author | Osip Mandelstam |
| ISBN | 0810119285 |
Collected prose works by one of Russia's towering literary figures. Osip Mandelstam has in recent years come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Mandelstam worked in many styles: autobiography, short story, travel writing, and polemic. Mandelstam's...
| Author | Yevgeny Zamyatin |
| ISBN | 0226978680 |
Zamyatin is best known for the brilliant dystopian novel We, one of the great classics of science fiction. The Dragon is a collection of fifteen of his short stories (including a 67 page novella) published between 1918 and 1935. It also includes an introduction by the translator, Mirra Ginsburg, and...
| Author | Andrei Bely |
| ISBN | 0810117576 |
The Silver Dove, published four years before Bely's masterpiece Petersburg, is considered the first modern Russian novel. Breaking with Russian realism, and a pioneering Symbolist work, its vividly drawn characters, elemental landscapes, and rich style make it accessible to the Western reader,...
| Author | Mikhail Zoshchenko |
| ISBN | 0253201926 |
Typical targets of Zoshchenko's satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." His devices are...
| Author | Tatyana Tolstaya |
| ISBN | 0394577981 |
A collection of thirteen short stories translated from the Russian. The author is distantly related to Tolstoy (a great-grand-niece).
In Loves Me, Loves Me Not, two little girls reflect back on their ugly nanny and how much they hated her.
In Sweet Shura, a woman in her late 80’s...
| 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 | Andrei Platonov |
| ISBN | 0940322331 |
This collection of Platonov's short fiction brings together seven works drawn from the whole of his career. It includes the harrowing novella Dzahn ("Soul"), in which a young man returns to his Asian birthplace to find his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech, and "The...
| Author | Eugene Ostashevsky |
| ISBN | 0810122936 |
OBERIU is an anthology of short works by three leading Russian absurdists: Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and Nikolai Zabolotsky. Between 1927 and 1930, the three made up the core of an avant-garde literary group called OBERIU (from an acronym standing for The Union of Real Art). It was a movement...
| Author | Philippe Soupault |
| ISBN | 1878972057 |
Written in 1928 by one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, and translated the following year by William Carlos Williams (the two had been introduced in Paris by a mutual friend), Last Nights of Paris is related to Surrealist novels such as Nadja and Paris Peasant, but also to the American expatriate...
| Author | Giorgio Manganelli |
| ISBN | 0929701720 |
Winner of ForeWord Magazine's Book-of-the-Year 2005 Silver Medallion for Translation Note: Three stories appeared in the March 2005 issue of Harpers magazine, and twelve stories in the spring 2005 "Zukofsky" issue of Chicago Review.
Italo Calvino once remarked that in Giorgio Manganelli,...
| Author | Victoria Nelson |
| ISBN | 0674012445 |
In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and...
| Author | Ronald Johnson |
| ISBN | 0974690244 |
Poetry. First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text. As the author explains, "To etch is 'to cut away, ' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is...
The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird
| Author | Douglas Thin |
| ISBN | 1590170261 |
"The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension...
| Author | Leo Tolstoy |
| ISBN | 0393960161 |
This Norton Critical Edition presents twelve of Tolstoy’s best-known stories, based on the Louise and Aylmer Maude translations (except “Alyosha Gorshok”), which have been revised by the editor for enhanced comprehension and annotated for student readers. The Second Edition newly includes...
| Author | Leonid Andreyev |
| ISBN | 1425478158 |
The Red Laugh is an utterly harrowing and nightmarish depiction of a sort of apocalypse that springs from the chaos, blood, and misery of Russia's humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, in language that prophetically echoes the horrors to come during the First World War. Centered on two nameless...
| Author | Tristan Tzara |
| ISBN | 0976844915 |
This major anthology of writings by legendary poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) is the only English language source for a complete version of Tzara's epic Approximate Man now widely regarded as the poetic masterpiece of Surrealism. Included is a critical introduction, an account of variants, and an...
| Author | Francis Picabia |
| ISBN | 0262162431 |
Poet, painter, self-described funny guy, idiot, failure, pickpocket, and anti-artist par excellence, Francis Picabia was a defining figure in the Dada movement; indeed, Andre Breton called Picabia one of the only "true" Dadas. Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into...
