Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories

Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories

Shalamov, Varlam
Rayfield, Donald
Valles, Alissa

Paperback

Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 168137367X
ISBN13: 9781681373676
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Jan 14 2020
Pages: 576
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
The astonishing follow-up to 2018's Kolyma Stories.

In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text.

In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral questions that plagued him in the camps where he encountered firsthand the criminal world as a real place, far more evil than Dostoyevsky's underground: How does someone stop being human? and How are criminals made? By 1972, when he was writing his last stories, the camps were being demolished, the guard towers and barracks razed. Did we exist? Shalamov asks, then answers without hesitation, I reply, 'We did.'

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