Pigs

"Pigs" is a brutally funny and terrifyingly accurate novel about an unknown district center in a very familiar country. Everything is here at once: balaclavas, faxes, ideological violence, and the degradation of local authorities. Alexander Charnukha creates a satire in which the grotesque becomes a reflection of reality - scary, funny and close. This is a den in which you don't want to be a doll, but we have all already been given roles.

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This is the story of a fictional district center in a non-existent state. Of course, the reader will quickly figure out the coordinate system and come up with a suitable name for this country. Officials who have lost touch with reality and who send each other important, but even more ridiculous faxes; security guards in balaclavas who perform only one task well - guarding the Lenin monument; a drunken editor of a district newspaper who writes poisonous slander about an invisible enemy; a formidable director of a culture house who knows only how to burn any song with censorship. In the novel "Pigs", fiction and non-fiction are closely intertwined into one tape, and sometimes it is impossible to notice where the fantasies end and the harsh truth of life begins.

"'The Post-Apocalypse Before the Fall', 'Orwell from Shchuchin', 'The Demonic Den' — stylistically, it's a mixture of the surreal feuilletons of Mastovshchikov and the chthony of early Elizarov, plus Sorokinsky, of course, the finale. If this text had been published in 2005, it would have been just as urgent and relevant: it very strongly brings back to hell the provincial zeros. All this is terribly funny and you even get tired of laughing, but this is precisely the den and madness." (Tatsyana Zamirovskaya)

"In times of human tragedies, tears do not save. So Alexander Charnukha tried to laugh. With a sardonic, sarcastic smile, but he smiled. And it turned out that looking at the time in which we were lucky enough to live is more frightening through laughter than through tears." (Vladimir Nyaklyaev)