In order to see what is real you need two telescopes. One from the past and another from the future.
Vladimir Sorokin makes a rare U.S. appearance to discuss the recent English-language publication of two of his novels, Telluria and Their Four Hearts, with Blake Butler, novelist and critic. Max Lawton, Sorokin’s translator, will offer simultaneous interpretation from Russian to English.
“He is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most inventive writers, an iconoclast who has chronicled the country’s slide toward authoritarianism with subversive fables that satirize bleak chapters of Soviet history and futuristic tales that capture the creeping repression of 21st-century Russia,” wrote The New York Times. “The translations arriving this year reveal the dizzying strangeness of Sorokin’s work. They reflect his obsession with the horrors of Russia’s past and his anxiety over where the country is headed.”