Little Jinx remains an unjustly overlooked entry point into one of the most important underground literary careers of the Soviet period.

One of the strangest and most subversive voices to emerge from Soviet literature, Andrei Sinyavsky wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz while smuggling his work to the West. For this, he was arrested, publicly tried, and sent to a labour camp. The fiction that emerged from that collision between imagination and state power remains unlike almost anything else produced in the twentieth century.

Little Jinx gathers together a sequence of stories, memoiristic fragments, absurdist sketches and satirical reflections that move effortlessly between the comic and the unsettling. Dogs become philosophical subjects, bureaucracies slip into nightmare, and ordinary conversations reveal entire political worlds lurking beneath them. Tertz's great gift is his refusal of realism's limits; reality is constantly stretched, distorted and rendered strange until its hidden mechanisms become visible.

Readers coming to Tertz through Kafka, Gogol, Bulgakov, Daniil Kharms or even early Kundera will find familiar territory, but his work possesses a peculiar freedom all its own. The humour is sharp, the intelligence mischievous, and beneath the playfulness sits the persistent question of what imagination can do when confronted by authority.

Paperback. Quartet Books, 1993. Includes an introduction by Edward J. Brown. Very good condition with light age toning and a clean, tightly bound interior.