PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published by the famed emigre dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin's Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of Blue Lard led to public demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov's The Children of Rosenthal, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. His most recent novel is Inheritance. He lives in Berlin. Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. He has translated several works by Vladimir Sorokin, including the NYRB Classics edition of Telluria. He lives in Los Angeles.
"""This frenetic 1999 novel by Sorokin, translated for the first time into English by Lawton, led to widespread protests in Russia due to the irreverent political satire contained within its science fiction frame....Sorokin’s patchwork fever dream takes on a weird and wonderful life. Readers will revel in the pandemonium."" —Publishers Weekly “Armed with fearless wit, giga-brain wordplay, and epicurean style to spare, iconoclastic supernova Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard hits like a pipe bomb in the despot’s wet dream of how we are. Already an archetypal subversive masterpiece that has literally incited right-wing riots in the streets—and now brought to new life in a bravura high-wire translation by Max Lawton—Gravity’s Rainbow, Naked Lunch, The 120 Days of Sodom, and Dr. Strangelove could be good kin . . . but really nothing should prepare you for the parade of unsparingly hysterical gallows terror in these pages, which demand we reckon with that fact it’s no longer merely satire to portend the systemized demise of literature itself, much less our souls’. Like fresh air in a gashouse, a waterfall in an inferno, what a blessing there’s Sorokin. Read, read, you jackals, while you still have eyes!” —Blake Butler “In Sorokin, Russia found its Pynchon.” —Vladislav Davidzon, Bookforum"
