"Chevengur is a philosophical novel that is also rich in psychological, social, and sensuous detail. Although it was never publishable in the USSR, it now stands as one of the most celebrated of Soviet novels, and along with The Foundation Pit, it is the most ambitious and moving of Andrey Platonov's efforts to take the measure of a world undergoing revolutionary transformation. The full text of Chevengur is here translated into English for the first...

"On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawkes, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Everett mines history for this one, focusing on the relationships between Native American activist and Black Panther groups who bonded over their shared enemies...

"I was nothing but a road to Midas. A means to get to where he wanted to go, and I paved that path in gold. My life as been made up of gilded lies. But death has been shaped from rot. Like a phoenix caught fire, I will need to rise from the ashes and learn to wield my own power. Because my wings may have been clipped, but I am not in a cage, and I'm finally free to fly from the frozen kingdoms I've been kept in. Yet the world doesn't want to let me....

"By turns brutally funny and starkly real, these three classic American novels create a memorable portrait of a young working-class intellectual from the South and his misadventures with hair straightening, partying with the bohemian elite of Greenwich Village, male prostitution, and drug abuse"--