"A remarkably funny book written by a remarkable pair of collaborators."--New York Times

Ostap Bender, the "grand strategist," is a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. He's obsessed with getting one last big score--a few hundred thousand will do--and heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are "a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception."

When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an "undercover millionaire"--no Soviet citizen was allowed to openly hoard so much capital--the chase...

Winner, 2012 Northern California Book Award for Fiction in Translation
More faithful to the original text and its deeply resonant humor, this new translation of The Twelve Chairs brings Ilf and Petrov s Russian classic fully to life. The novel s iconic hero, Ostap Bender, an unemployed con artist living by his wits, joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to look for a cache of missing jewels hidden in chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the chairs takes them from the...