A collection of ten stories by a Russian writer who, after the overthrow of the tsar, turned to writing children's stories when he could no longer publish his politically charged adult works. "Hilarious as well as absurd."-Book Links

It Happened Like This: Stories and Poems

Children's Books

Kharms, Daniil

Literature & Fiction

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

A hen and her chicks and a duck and her ducklings star in a bedtime tale of a bad dream and an amazing rescue

Across the Stream

Ginsburg, Mirra

Animals

William Morrow & Co.

A writer who defies categorization, Daniil Kharms has come to be regarded as an essential artist of the modernist avant-garde. His writing, which partakes of performance, narrative, poetry, and visual elements, was largely suppressed during his lifetime, which ended in a psychiatric ward where he starved to death during the siege of Leningrad. His work, which survived mostly in notebooks, can now be seen as one of the pillars of absurdist literature, most explicitly manifested in the 1920s and ’30s Soviet Union by the OBERIU group, which inherited the mantle of Russian futurism from such poets as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. This selection of prose and poetry provides the most comprehensive portrait of the writer in English translation to date, revealing the arc of his career and including a particularly generous selection of his later work.

Russian Absurd: Selected Writings (Northwestern World Classics)

Literary

Northwestern University Press

Translation of children's poems from its original Russian into English. Full-colour book.

The Charms of Harms: Selected Poems by Daniil Kharms

Poetry

Matteo Publishing

Drama. Poetry. Translated from the Russian by C Dylan Bassett and Emma Winsor Wood. People disappear without explanation. The government takes hostages. War and death occur without reason or meaning. The cycle of poverty and deprivation proliferates. A FAILED PERFORMANCE is a collection of bizarre and darkly humorous plays and scenes from the Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms. This collection--the first volume in English dedicated entirely to Kharms's dramatic works--includes his major stage plays Elizaveta Bam and Lapa as well as lesser-known sketches and hybrid poem-plays, most of which were never published or performed during his lifetime.

A Failed Performance

Dramas & Plays

53rd State Press

Willie went for a sled ride and slid swiftly down the hillside. Down the hill he slid his sled, and hit a hunter as he sped. If you take a look at the pictures in the book, and read all the text, you'll see what happens next. Full color.

The Story of a Boy Named Will, Who Went Sledding Down the Hill

North-South Books

“I am a Phenomenon Quite out of the Ordinary” offers a fascinating look into the life and mind of poet and prose miniaturist Daniil Kharms (1905- 1942). One of the legendary figures of the “Last Soviet Avant-Garde,” Kharms was the tutelary spirit of “Russia’s lost literature of the absurd.” His work, rescued from oblivion by a dedicated group of friends and scholars, has attained an almost cult-like status among present-day Russia’s literary elite. In this volume, Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto translate a wide-ranging selection of materials from Kharms’ private notebooks, diaries, letters, and even documents from the KGB archives detailing Kharms’ tragic end in a psychiatric prison hospital—most never before published in English. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian literature, Soviet culture, and the inner workings of the mind of a quirky genius.

"I am a Phenomenon Quite out of the Ordinary": The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms (Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century)

Biographies & Memoirs

Anemone, Antony

Arts & Literature

Academic Studies Press

Daniil Kharms was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. He came to be known for his children's literature. Kharms' stories are typically brief vignettes often only a few paragraphs long, in which scenes of poverty and deprivation alternate with fantastic, dreamlike occurrences and acerbic comedy. His world is unpredictable and disordered; characters repeat the same actions many times in succession or otherwise behave irrationally; linear stories start to develop but are interrupted in midstream by inexplicable catastrophes that send them in completely different directions.

Stories for Children: Rasskazy Dlya Detei (Russian Edition)

Short Stories & Anthologies

JiaHu Books

Offers vignettes and stories by the Soviet avant-garde writer dealing with everyday events characterized by violence, deprivation, and alienation

Incidences (Extraordinary Classics)

Serpent's Tail

“With remarkable precision and fluid language, the stories capture everyday tension in a land where an innocent knock on the door might mean entrapment in a bureaucratic maze or even death at the hands of the military.”—The New York Times Book Review This collection of stories is composed of short miniatures, many of which the author called “incidents.” The quirky, bold writing of Incidences perfectly captures the surreal spirit of its times.

Incidences

Five Star

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Books by Kharms, Daniil