PublishedNew York Review Books, February 2010 |
ISBN9781590173190 |
FormatSoftcover, 256 pages |
Dimensions20cm × 12.5cm × 1.8cm |
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s-but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher-the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony- a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future.