{"product_id":"the-queue-isbn-9781590172742","title":"The Queue","description":"Vladimir Sorokin’s first published novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Queue\u003c\/i\u003e, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet “years of stagnation.” Thousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn’t matter–if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin’s tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on.\u003cp\u003e[A] landmark of international postmodern fiction.\u003cbr\u003e— Keith Gessen \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"If queues were arranged in order of merit, it would only be fair to put the young  Soviet writer Vladimir Sorokin at the head.\" -\u003ci\u003eGuardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"With humor, anger and irony,  Sorokin creates a brilliant set piece, conveying the absurdity, the dehumanization  and, above all, the inevitability of waiting in line.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Queue \u003c\/i\u003edispenses entirely with authorial interpolation; indeed, it dispenses with everything  except dialogue, mostly curt one-liners, as though transcribed direct from a radio  play. The uncredited voices are queueing outside a clothes shop in summer: Party  panjandrums barge in front of the accompaniment of quickly muffled protests; vodka  circulates; the Moscow sun dexlines; romance germinates. Anti-Soviet elements will  perhaps coo over Valdimir Sorokin's happy mining of elemental koptimism from an unlikely  seam; more pertinent to our purposes this book, alone of the quartet, displays genuine  zest.\" -\u003ci\u003eThe Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This novel reduces to delightful absurdity the rough  democracy of the long lines that Soviet people-in-the-street endure in order to buy  \"luxury\" goods. Sorokin is an innovative young writer, never published officially  in the USSR, who draws on two great Russian traditions sorely missing from Soviet  literature: avant-garde experiment and a flair for nonsense. The book has no description,  settings, or stage directionnothing but voices: snatches of conversation, rumors,  jokes, howls of rage, roll calls, and sexy moans. Sorokin's magic pen turns this  framework into a mini-picaresque novel with a hero of sorts. Readers with some imagination  will enjoy following Vadim and his co-queuers through their days and nights on line  and off.\" -\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMr. Sorokin demonstrates a remarkable ear for dialogue...Occasionally in its characters’ speech \u003ci\u003eThe Queue\u003c\/i\u003e resembles, as befits a colloquial account of an overnight queue, \u003ci\u003eWaiting for Godot\u003c\/i\u003e. Its humor, however, is broader and nowhere as stark.\u003cbr\u003e— \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Queue \u003c\/i\u003eis a devastating satire of Soviet bureaucracy,  and its message is made even more effective by the deadpan method chosen for its  delivery...reminiscent of Kafka, Orwell and Beckett in their explorations of nightmare  societies...It's ending is ironic and funny, while reinforcing the cynical tone of  the whole novel and the impression that the Soviet Union is a vast, unmanageable  bureaucracy.\" -\u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVladimir 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Queue\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ewas published by the famed ?migr?  dissident Andrei Sinyavksy in France in 1983. In 1992, Sorokin’s \u003ci\u003eCollected Stories \u003c\/i\u003ewas nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial  novel \u003ci\u003eBlue Lard\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eMoscow\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e The Kopeck\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003e4\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov’s \u003ci\u003eThe Children of Rosenthal\u003c\/i\u003e,  the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. He  has written numerous novels, plays, and short stories, and his work has been translated  throughout the world. NYRB Classics published his novel \u003ci\u003eIce \u003c\/i\u003ein 2007. He lives in  Moscow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSally Laird (1956-2010) was the editor of \u003ci\u003eVoices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers\u003c\/i\u003e, and the translator of many books, including \u003ci\u003eThe Time: Night\u003c\/i\u003e by Ludmila Petrushevskaya.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300029878501,"sku":"NP9781590172742","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590172742.jpg?v=1767741136","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-queue-isbn-9781590172742","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}