U.R. Bowie DISAMBIGUATIONS: THREE NOVELLAS ON RUSSIAN THEMES U.R. Bowie holds a Ph.D. in Russian literature. The three tales included here are written in English, but make no mistake: they are firmly in the tradition of Russian literature. In fact, the great Nikolai Gogol, with what the critic Mirsky once called "his volcano of imaginative creativeness," blows through all three works, both in body and spirit. The first novella, "Exhumation," features Gogol in the flesh (and then out of it). Beginning with scenes from the writer's life in the nineteenth century, it goes on to describe the...

"Own: The Sad and Like-Wike Weepy Tale of Wittle Elkie Selph" comes out of the tradition of "Huckleberry Finn," "The Catcher in the Rye," and (especially) "A Clockwork Orange." This story of a school shooting in the hills of NE Georgia is narrated by the fifteen-year-old shooter, Elkin (Own) Selph, in a jazzed-up style that mixes together Southern dialect, bizarrely inventive terms, and words from Burgess's "Clockwork Orange." If Own were to sum up his plight as the novel begins, here is what he would say: My name's Elkin (Own) Selph, from Tocotano, GA. I love ole Georgie-what's not to love?...

HARD MOTHER (A Novel in Lectures and Dreams) Condensed Synopsis The year is 2021. The world is slowly recovering from the Great Catastrophe of 1996. You say there was no worldwide catastrophe in 1996. This is a work of fiction, and in this work there was. A middle-aged woman, Rebecca A. Breeze, professor of Russian literature at Oogleyville State College (Mass.), in the midst of a breakdown, has been forced by her superiors to consult a therapist. She refuses treatment by modern methods of drug and machine therapy, but agrees to describe her violent dreams. "The dreams...Russian literature...

Replete with Gogolian absurdity and high comedy, GOGOL'S HEAD features Nikolai Gogol himself in semi-fictional scenes; the book is written in a parody of Gogol's own style. In June, 1931, the body of Nikolai Gogol, great writer of the Russian land, was exhumed at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, where Gogol's remains had rested since his death in 1852. When the coffin was opened the head was missing. Or was it? What about other myths? Was the body turned on its side, or upside down; were there scratch marks on the underside of the coffin lid? In his lifetime Gogol's contemporaries sought...