Unwitting Street - by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Paperback)
Similar Products
Products of same category from the store
All
Product info
<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"This is an original collection of stories with no Russian equivalent. They span the whole of Krzhizhanovsky's writing career (1920-1940). The title story was unearthed only in 2012. It is named for an actual street in Moscow (Unwitting Street) and serves as a metaphor for Russian history"--Provided by publisher.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time.</b> <p/>When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning--he has died--his pants dash off to work without him. The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical and phantasmagorical stories. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (<i>Memories of the Future</i> and <i>Autobiography of a Corpse</i>) are denser and darker, the creations in <i>Unwitting Street</i> are on the lighter side: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being enlettered in type and entombed in a book; the soul of a politician turned chess master winds up in one of his pawns; an unsentimental parrot journeys from prewar Austria to Soviet Russia.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"These philosophical, melancholic, darkly funny tales merit a place beside those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino." --<i>Kirkus</i>, starred review <p/>"This collection . . . mixes playful and morose tones in stories of the kooky and the condemned . . . clever and satirical in his descriptions, Krzhizhanovsky is at his best when finding levity in grave revelations." --<i>Publishers Weekly</i> <p/>"Krzhizhanovsky found his definitive English voice in the Moscow-based translator Joanne Turnbull. . . . Turnbull has co-created Krzhizhanovsky's best phantasmagorical modernist fictions in paperbacks published by New York Review Books." --Caryl Emerson<br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Sigizmund Krzizhanovsky</b> (1887-1950) studied law and classical philology at Kiev University. In his philosophical and satirical stories with fantastical plots, he ignored official injunctions to portray the new Soviet state in a positive light, and three separate efforts to print different collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. Two of his short story collections, <i>Autobiography of a Corpse</i> and <i>Memories of the Future</i>, and his novels <i>The Letter Killers Club</i> and <i>The Return of Munchhausen</i> are also available as NYRB Classics. <p/><b>Joanne Turnbull</b>'s translations from Russian in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov include Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's <i>The Letter Killers Club</i> (winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Literary Translation into English) and <i>Autobiography of a Corpse</i> (winner of the PEN Translation Prize).
Price History
Price Archive shows prices from various stores, lets you see history and find the cheapest. There is no actual sale on the website. For all support, inquiry and suggestion messagescommunication@pricearchive.us