"A welcome volume of stories from Russia's finest contemporary fiction writer, Mikhail Shishkin, full of his typical fusing of mysticism and modernist experimentation." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

The first English-language collection of short stories by Russia's greatest contemporary author, Mikhail Shishkin, the only author to win all three of Russia's most prestigious literary awards.

Often included in discussions of Nobel Prize contenders, Shishkin is a master prose writer in the breathtakingly beautiful style of the greatest Russian authors, known for complex,...

"Death of a Prototype" is the first work by Victor Beilis to make it into English since the single-volume publication in 2002 of a duo of novellas--"The Rehabilitation of Freud & Bakhtin and Others"( translated by Richard Grose). Much like the novellas that preceded it, "Death of a Prototype" is a hyper-allusive and self-consciously 'difficult' work: Beilis delights in intertextual play, inviting the reader to unravel a complex web of quotations, references and paraphrases. The author engages closely with an entire spectrum of Russian and European cultural traditions, from classical...