In the traditions of Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, German Sadulaev's follow-up to his acclaimed I am a Chechen! is set in a twenty-first century Russia, phantasmagorical and violent. A bitingly funny twenty-first century satire, The Maya Pill tells the story of a mid-level manager at a frozen-food import company who comes upon a box of psychotropic pills that's accidentally been slipped into a shipment. He takes one, and disappears down the rabbit hole: entering th...

I Am a Chechen! offers a lyrical fusion of exotic legends, stories and memories of Chechnya: a land of wondrous beauty, site of genocides past and present, and the author's ancestral home.Haunted by memories of the land he deserted, Sadulaev tells the stories of those who stayed behind. He brings dead friends back to life again, revisiting their first loves, their passion for rock music, their quests for martyrdom. And he immerses us in the intoxicating beauty of his homel...

A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia, where even dictatorship is a reality show.**“A gripping and unsettling account.” —**Washington PostProfessional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet masters, Hells Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors: welcome to twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, ch...

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the YearFrom the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics.No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Sta...

In the waning months of 1956, while Russian tanks roll into the public squares of Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution, brothers Robert and Attila Beck flee with their family to the Paris townhouse of their great-aunt Hermina. As they travel through minefields both real and imagined, Robert and Attila grapple with sibling rivalry, family secrets, and incalculable loss to arrive at a place they thought they’d lost forever: home.In beautifully crafted writing that burns with in...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A wheeling meditation on the wired life, on privacy, on what being human in the age of binary code might mean” (The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The NetanyahusNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL**“Shatteringly powerful . . . I cannot think of anything by anyone in [Cohen’s] generation t...

A rich and imaginative discovery of how ink has shaped culture and why it is here to stayInk is so much a part of daily life that we take it for granted, yet its invention was as significant as the wheel. Ink not only recorded culture, it bought political power, divided peoples, and led to murderous rivalries. Ancient letters on a page were revered as divine light, and precious ink recipes were held secret for centuries. And, when it first hit markets not so long a...

Our civilization will be the first in the entire history of the planet to unite the opposites: the technocratic world and the achievements of the divine creations. This is not a fantasy, it is the great future. We can sense it already, today.Tens of thousands of Russian citizens have already begun to materialize it. They are doing so without support from governments and states. Millions are dreaming of it, and I am no longer alone as a believer. People are not creating this future o...

Readers can discover all the foul facts about ROTTEN RULERS, including who gave the job of high priest to a donkey, who choked to death while eating a crow and who celebrated victory by eating his enemy's head.

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter PomerantsevIn this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On ho...

In In the late 16th century, the Jewish Quarter in the ancient city of Prague was under attack. Roving bands of anti-Semitic Christians were threatening the Jews with extinction. In response, legends say, a rabbi went down to the Vltava River and fashioned a huge, horrifying creature out of the mud of the riverbank.This creature was the Golem.The Golem did its work, protecting the Jewish Quarter from its attackers. Some say it did its work too well, and had to be put down f...

A compelling memoir—"hilarious and heartbreaking" (The New York Times)—of two intertwined journeys: a Jewish refugee family in Ukraine fleeing persecution and a young man seeking to reclaim a shattered pastIn the twilight of the Cold War (the late 1980s), nine-year old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border, leaving Ukraine with only ten suitcases, $600, and the vague promise of help awaiting in Vienna. Years later, Lev, now an American adult,...