A satire about the Soviet space program finds Omon, who has dreamed of space flight all of his life, enrolling as a cosmonaut, only to learn that his task will be piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar vehicle to the moon and remaining there to die.

Omon Ra

Literature & Fiction

Victor Pelevin

Humor & Satire

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Set in a crumbling Soviet Black Sea resort, The Life of Insects with its motley cast of characters who exist simultaneously as human beings (racketeers, mystics, drug addicts and prostitutes) and as insects, extended the surreal comic range for which Pelevin's first novel Omon Ra was acclaimed by critics. With consummate literary skill Pelevin creates a satirical bestiary which is as realistic as it is delirious - a bitter parable of contemporary Russia, full of the probing, disenchanted comedy that makes Pelevin a vital and altogether surprising writer.

The Life of Insects

Contemporary

Gardners Books

A manic satire of psychiatry, crime and corruption in Russia. Peter Null is undergoing treatment in Moscow's Psychiatric Clinic number 17, where his consultant believes the way to treat his condition is to humour his delusive personality until it achieves reintegration with the rest of his psyche.

The clay machine-gun

Faber&Faber

A manic satire of psychiatry, crime and corruption in Russia. Peter Null is undergoing treatment in Moscow's Psychiatric Clinic number 17, where his consultant believes the way to treat his condition is to humour his delusive personality until it achieves reintegration with the rest of his psyche.

The Clay Machine-Gun

Translated from the Russian, this razor-sharp satire on consumer culture, Russian style, follows the irresistible rise of a Moscow advertising copywriter, who specialises in adjusting Western adverts to the Eastern mentality and selling Pepsi, Seven-up, Gucci, Mercedes and Reebok to the rising middle class.

Babylon

A. Huli, the heroine of Victor Pelevin's latest book, is beautiful, slender and curiously foxlike. She lives in Moscow and works as a classy prostitute in the city's premier hotels. But when a client goes inexplicably and fatally berserk at the sight of her in his luxury suite, A. Huli has to leave in a hurry. She decides to explore new avenues and place an ad on the internet - and that's when the trouble really starts. Victor Pelevin's new work of fiction is both a supernatural love story and an outrageously funny satirical portrait of modern Russia. With all his characteristic humour and metaphysical ambition, Pelevin introduces us to an unforgettable cast of perverts, former KGB agents, oil tycoons and amorous werewolves.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

High class Moscow hooker A. Huli is foxy in more ways than one...And when a client goes inexplicably and fatally berserk at the sight of her in his luxury suite she has to employ all of her cunning to escape. But it's not till she places an ad on the internet that trouble really begins to kick off as the journey she takes catapults her into a world of perverts, former KGB agents, oil tycoons and amorous werewolves.

A richly textured novel of vanity, greed, and advertising revisits the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is now primed and ready for exploitation, as Tartarsky, a copywriter who has a knack for concocting home-grown alternatives to Western ads, is plunged into a realm of gangsters, spin doctors, and drug dealers where reality slowly begins to dissolve. 10,000 first printing.

Homo Zapiens

Andrew Bromfield

Viking Adult

Set during the advent of perestroika, a surreal, satirical novella by a critically acclaimed young Russian writer traces the fate of the passengers on The Yellow Arrow, a long-distance Russian train headed for a ruined bridge.

The Yellow Arrow

New Directions

In a recent New York Times Magazine feature article, Victor Pelevin was cited as "almost alone among his generation of Russian novelists in speaking with a voice authentically his own, and in trying to write about Russian life in its current idiom." Since the publication of this collection of stories, The Blue Lantern, Pelevin's books have been translated into many languages, and Pelevin himself has been touted as a major world writer. The Blue Lantern, winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, gathers eight of his very best stories. Various, delightful, and uncategorizable, the stories are highly addictive. Pelevin here, as in The Yellow Arrow (New Directions, 1996), Omon Ra (ND, 1997), and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia (ND, 1998), pays great attention to the meaning of life, in earnest and as spoof. In the title story, kids in a Pioneer camp tell terrifying bedtime stories; in "Hermit and Six-Toes," two chickens are obsessed with the nature of the universe as viewed from their poultry plant; the Young Communist League activists of "Mid-Game" change their sex to become hard-currency prostitutes; and "The Life and Adventures of Shed #XII" is the story of a storage hut whose dream is to become a bicycle.

The Blue Lantern: Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Victor Pelevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Victor Pelevin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Victor Pelevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Omon Ra

The Life of Insects

The clay machine-gun

The Clay Machine-Gun

Babylon

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Homo Zapiens

The Yellow Arrow

The Blue Lantern: Stories