The Blue Lantern and Other Stories

Victor Pelevin's highly acclaimed story collection, The Blue Lantern, winner of the Russian Little Booker Prize, gathers eight of his very best stories. Various, delightful, and uncategorizable, the stories are highly addictive. Pelevin here, as in The Yellow Arrow (New Directions, 1996), Omon Ra (ND, 1997), and A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia (ND, 1998), pays great attention to the meaning of life, in earnest and as spoof. In the title story, kids in a Pioneer-camp tell terrifying bedtime stories; in "Hermits and Six-Toes," two chickens are obsessed with the nature of the universe as viewed from their poultry plant; the young communist-league activists of "Mid-Game" change their sex to become hard-currency prostitutes; and "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII" is the story of a storage hut whose dream is to become a bicycle.