Dispatches from the District Committee

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 1983. 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; in 2001, he received the Andrei Biely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for the movies Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s Rosenthal’s Children, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. He has written numerous plays and short stories, and his work has been translated throughout the world. Among his most recent books are Sugar Kremlin and Day of the Oprichnik. He lives in Moscow.

"Sorokin, global literature's postmodern provocateur, is both a savage and satirist and a consummate showman." —Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review"An explosive and taboo-busting collection... Though not for the faint of heart, Sorokin's singular vision demands attention." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"[Sorokin's] disorienting prose forces the mind to react—to focus, to sharpen—and urges us to be on guard against revered forms and the literary conventions of authority." —Harper's"Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia's most inventive writers." —The New York Times"Sorokin’s work feels more and more urgent by the hour." —On the Seawall"For American readers today, already getting sci-fi shell-shocked by war news, political crime news, medical news, ... this helps spotlight (without a narrator and without stage directions), how we read, how we avoid, how we survive." —Bruce Andrews"Sorokin's books are like entering a crazy nightmare, and I mean that as a compliment ... He was able to find the right vocabulary with which to articulate the truth." —Gary Shteyngart"Socialist Realism has been tried and found guilty. Guilty of annoying edification, stifling clichés, propagandistic lies voiced by its stock characters, and fear of the body in all its messy manifestations. In Dispatches from the District Committee, Vladimir Sorokin acts as its executioner. Each short story is a Grand Guignol performance, in which Soviet style is condemned to a gruesome death. Don't feel sorry for Socialist Realism; just lean back and enjoy its just desserts in Max Lawton's masterful translation." —The Untranslated"Sorokin’s sudden exposure is long overdue as he is probably both the most acclaimed and the most controversial author in Russia today, hailed by critics as a ‘living classic’ even as his subject matter takes the tradition of Russian grotesque into areas Gogol or even the Stalin-era absurdist Daniil Kharms never dared venture." —Daniel Kalder, Publishing Perspectives"Dispatches is a key moment in Sorokin’s development as a writer and an important part of Max Lawton’s project to help Anglophone readers experience Sorokin’s vital contribution to prose fiction in our time." —Rain Taxi