Prague is a place where murders happen, and it takes an English-speaking Russian expat with a strong antipathy for the city and its inhabitants to solve the mystery . . . or maybe not. As the plots thicken, the two narrators of Kirill Kobrin’s ten short stories gradually merge into a single hazy, undefined personality, characterized by a passion for logical reasoning, which leads to the identification of the culprit; except that the laboriously constructed murder narrative may stand or fall on a typo, and the mentally satisfying conclusion may or may not have much to do with reality . . .
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Prague is a place where murders happen, and it takes an English-speaking Russian expat with a strong antipathy for the city and its inhabitants to solve the mystery . . . or maybe not. As the plots thicken, the two narrators of Kirill Kobrin's ten short stories gradually merge into a single hazy, undefined personality, characterized by a passion for logical reasoning, which leads to the identification of the culprit; except that the laboriously constructed murder narrative may stand or fall on a typo, and the mentally satisfying conclusion may or may not have much to do with reality . . .
Kirill Kobrin writes fiction and nonfiction prose, co-edits Moscow magazine of sociology, history and politics Neprikosnovenniy Zapas ("Emergency Rations"), and researches the cultural history of Russia and the Czech Republic. Kobrin is the author of fifteen books in Russian, one of them is a tribute to Flann O'Brien, Tekstoobrabotka ("Bookhandling"). Some critics hailed him as the "Russian Borges" and "one of the founders of Russian psychogeography." His texts have been translated into several European languages. Kobrin lives in London.
Veronika Lakotova is a translator of English, Russian and Slovak, who is currently living in Bratislava, Slovakia. A former employee of Dalkey Archive Press, this present volume marks her first book-length translation in print.