Press

• The translation by Ast A. Moore is delightfully idiomatic and accurate down to every last gram and cut of meat.
  —Michele A. Berdy, The Moscow Times, 2015

• Polly Gannon has done a superb job of making sure that the tone, texture, and most important, the humor in Bitov’s writing, all make a seamless transition from the original Russian text into English.
  —JP O’Malley, The Washington Post, 2014

• Bitov’s skill—and here the translator Polly Gannon deserves much praise for her fluid and polished translation—is to show the elusiveness of words just as we grasp them: language cannot be pinned down in meaning, characters might or might not have a certain name—or even be the same person—and they may or may not be telling lies.
  —Lucy Renner Jones, Words without Borders, 2014

• I like, no, I love, the book, see its value for a broader readership, and begin designing courses and creating syllabi in my head so I can force (okay, attempt to force . . .) a group of unsuspecting but curious undergraduates to read, appreciate, and love it, too.
  —Lisa Hayden Espenschade, Lizok’s Bookshelf, 2014

• [T]he book was impossible to put down and I finished the novel immediately hungering for another helping of Sir Max’s adventures.
  —Robert Thompson, Fantasy Book Critic, 2011

• [W]hile [Baldaev’s] analysis of the Soviet disaster rests upon simplistic nostalgia for a golden age of church and monarchy, the editors of this book have convincingly corroborated many of his representations with parallel accounts from the canon of Russian Gulag literature.
  —Roland Elliott Brown, The Guardian, 2010