The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin is a great piece of Soviet satire, a sub-genre of which there’s plenty to love.

Like the host of Russian satirists that preceded him–Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov–Sorokin jumps in impish dance around a host of unspeakable subjects, subjects made taboo by the State, weaknesses that are are never explicitly named, but hang on the minds of everyone. Where Gogol poked fun at the stifling and torturous bureaucracy of Czarist Russia, and Zoshchenko laughed at the stupidity of petty officialdom in the early years of the Revolution, Sorokin takes on the mind-numbing banality of life during late-era Soviet Communism. …more

About six months ago, as I was nearing the end of Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, I came across the chapter titled “Prologues to The Library of Babel.” The chapter began with a list of authors whose works were selected to fill 33 volumes in The Library of Babel …more