The Sugar Kremlin

Presenting a wide variety of genres and tones, The Sugar Kremlin lays out a frightening vision of speculative mercilessness and carnivalesque political horror. The Sugar Kremlin is the follow-up to Vladimir Sorokin's Day of the Oprichnik, taking place in the same New Medieval universe over the course of fifteen chapters that all return to the object of the title: replicas of the Moscow Kremlin made of sugar. Thousands of these creations are given away to children during the holidays, then make their way through each stratum of Russian society. We follow the trajectories of these candied gifts from the hands of harried paupers to secret political dissidents, from torture-obsessed civil servants to sex workers in a nearby bordello... As Sorokin shifts from story to story and style to style, he draws the reader through grotesquely Russian scenes, creating an aberrantly metaphysical encyclopedia of the New Medieval "Russian soul." The candy's sweetness is deceptive--underneath it, you may detect notes of blood and excrement.

About the Author :
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. In 1992, Sorokin's Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and to demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer. His award-winning works have been translated throughout the world, most recently by Dalkey Archive Press and NYRB Classics. Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin, including Blue Lard (NYRB Classics), Their Four Hearts, and Dispatches from the District Committee (both from Dalkey Archive Press). Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times, and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen has published novels (The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz), a collection of stories (Four New Messages), and a collection of essays (Attention). He was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and his awards include the Matanel Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Review :
"An empire in decline literally walling itself off from the world, a marauding gang of government thugs disappearing its 'internal enemies, ' a gadget-addicted society drifting further and further backwards into time--you can read The Sugar Kremlin for the eerie resonances with our own imploding, candy-colored civilization, or you can read it as another impossibly imaginative emanation from the mind of one of Russia's greatest living writers. But why choose? Translated with equal parts delirium and precision by Max Lawton, The Sugar Kremlin collapses reality and satire, present and past with a heedlessness that only Vladimir Sorokin can muster. A brilliant, hilarious, terrifying triumph." --Mark Krotov, coeditor of n+1