A satire about the Soviet space program finds Omon, who has dreamed of space flight all of his life, enrolled 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[...]

Russian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber-age." In his third novel, Buddha's Little Finger, Pele[...]

The main character, Andrei, is a passenger aboard the Yellow Arrow, who begins to despair over the trains ultimate destination and looks for a way out as the chapters count down. Indifferent to their fate, the other passengers carry on as usual trading in nickel melted down fro the carriage doors, a[...]

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 storie[...]

When Ariadne helped Theseus escape the Minotaur's labyrinth with the aid of a ball of thread, she led the way for the bewildered victims of a twenty-first century minotaur.[...]