An ant and other animals all take shelter from the rain beneath a mushroom. They don't think they will all fit under one tiny mushroom, but they still make room for others.

I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously, perhaps from heat lightning, perhaps from bombs. Later each night, as was my custom, I would wander out into the steamy back alleys of the city, where no one ever seemed to sleep, and crouch in doorways with the people and listen to the stories of their culture and their ancestors and their ongoing...

Once known only to a small circle of admirers in Russia and the West, Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) has emerged to assume his rightful place as one of the major Russian writers of the twentieth century. Set during a small Russian town during the forcible collectivization of agriculture, The Foundation Pit portrays a group of workmen and local bureaucrats engaged in digging the foundation pit for a grand building where all the town's will live happily and "in silence."