The Queue
10 best books like The Queue (Vladimir Sorokin): Envy, Sofia Petrovna, White Walls: Collected Stories, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Petersburg, Memories of the Future, The Golovlyov Family, Pushkin House, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays
| 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 | Lydia Chukovskaya |
| ISBN | 0810111500 |
Sofia Petrovna is Lydia Chukovskaya's fictional account of the Great Purge. Sofia is a Soviet Everywoman, a doctor's widow who works as a typist in a Leningrad publishing house. When her beloved son is caught up in the maelstrom of the purge, she joins the long lines of women outside the prosecutor's...
| 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 | Victor Serge |
| ISBN | 1590170644 |
One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead in the street, and the search for his killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at...
| Author | Andrei Bely |
| ISBN | 0253202191 |
Taking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, 'Petersburg' is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital—a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character. History, culture, and politics are blended...
| Author | Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky |
| ISBN | 1590173198 |
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room;...
| Author | M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin |
| ISBN | 0940322579 |
Searingly hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, the ancestral estate of the Golovlyov family is the end of the road. There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Porphyry.
One of the...
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...
| Author | Vladimir Voinovich |
| ISBN | 0810112434 |
Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant...
| Author | Vasily Grossman |
| ISBN | 1590173619 |
The Road brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning...
| 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 | Olga Grushin |
| ISBN | 0143038400 |
Olga Grushin's astonishing literary debut has won her comparisons with everyone from Gogol to Nabokov. A virtuoso study in betrayal and its consequences, it explores - really, colonizes - the consciousness of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground...
| Author | Vasily Aksyonov |
| ISBN | 0679761829 |
Magnífico de principio a fin... y mira que hay páginas entre uno y otro.
Los que disfrutaron de Vida y destino, de Grossman (comparten la misma traductora, Marta Rebón), disfrutarán aún más de este libro a poco que nuestros gustos se asemejen. Y digo disfrutar a pesar de las barbaridades...
| 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 | 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 | 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,...
| 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...
