The Hall of the Singing Caryatids Page 9

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

  First published as a Pearl (NDP1214) by New Directions in 2011

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Set in Albertina and Frutiger

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pelevin, Viktor.

  [Zal pojuwih kariatid. English]

  The hall of the singing caryatids / Victor Pelevin ; translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. — 1st American pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  “A New Directions Pearl.”

  eISBN 978-0-8112-1953-2

  I. Bromfield, Andrew. II. Title.

  PG3485.E38Z3313 2011

  891.7344—dc23

  2011023260

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011

  THE NEW DIRECTIONS PEARLS

  César Aira, The Literary Conference

  Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing

  Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, On Booze

  Nikolai Gogol, The Night Before Christmas

  Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende

  Javier Marías, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

  Yukio Mishima, Patriotism

  Victor Pelevin, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids

  Joseph Roth, The Leviathan

  Tennessee Williams, Tales of Desire

  Forthcoming

  Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

  Robert Walser, The Walk

  Victor Pelevin

  "Mr. Pelevin is certainly an unusual and strange writer, one with the kind of mordant, astringent turn of mind that in the pre-glasnost era landed writers in psychiatric hospitals or exile."

  ––The New York Times

  "Victor Pelevin is the real article: a writer whose imagination dances on the heads of the rustiest pins in history, while maintaining a likably zany manner."

  ––San Francisco Bay Guardian

  "A master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human."

  ––Spin

  Born in Moscow in 1962, Victor Pelevin got a degree in electro-mechanical engineering from the Moscow Power Engineerings Institute before studying at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. Pelevin's first story was published in 1989 and his collection The Blue Lantern won the Russian Little Booker Prize. A notorious media recluse, Pelevin prefers to spend time in Buddhist monastery retreats when he is not writing. A journalist once invited him to lunch and secretly recorded and published their entire conversation. In 2006 Pelevin posted all his published work up to that point online. His latest novel, Pineapple Water for a Beautiful Lady, was published in Russia in 2010.