The Sugar Kremlin

“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

“The Sugar Kremlin is a rewarding read, a worthwhile addition to a personal collection of Sorokin, and another fine example of the author’s style of recreating (and not, as he emphasizes, describing) the world through a kind of mixing of styles and perspectives in a technique he calls “faceted vision, like what insects have.” —The Argyle