Blue Lard

Informationen zum Autor Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue , was published by the famed émigré dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1985. In 1992, Sorokin’s Their Four Hearts was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of Blue Lard led to public demonstrations against the book and demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Bely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for Moscow , The Kopeck , and 4 , and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s The Children of Rosenthal, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. His most recent novel is Inheritance . He lives in Berlin. Max Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. His translations of Sorokin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker , Harper’s Magazine , and n+1 . In addition to more than ten of Sorokin’s books, forthcoming from NYRB Classics and Dalkey Archive Press, he is currently working on translations of works by Michael Lentz, Antonio Moresco, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  He lives in Los Angeles. Klappentext "ABOUT BLUE LARD The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination. Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author's books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese-peppered with ample neologisms-and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this "script-process" is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon-that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade, Sorokin's novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon-and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence"-- Zusammenfassung The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination. Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Mosco...

Product details

• Authors: Max Lawton, Vladimir Sorokin
• Publisher: NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 20.02.2024
• EAN: 9781681378183
• ISBN: 978-1-68137-818-3
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 127 mm x 202 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Comic, cartoon, humour, satire