Unwitting Street

Eighteen strange, whimsical, and philosophical tales by the Russian master of the weird, all now in English for the very first time.When Comrade Punt does not wake up one Moscow morning — he has died — his pants dash off to work without him. (The substitution of a part for the whole is not unusual under the sun.) The ambitious pants soon have their own office and secretary. So begins the first of eighteen superb examples of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's philosophical, phantasmagorical, at times Swiftian short-form oeuvre. Where the stories included in two earlier NYRB collections (Memories of the Future and Autobiography of a Corpse) are denser and darker, the creations in Unwitting Street are slighter and/or lighter: an ancient goblet brimful of self-replenishing wine drives its owner into the drink; a hypnotist's attempt to turn a fly into an elephant backfires; a philosopher's free-floating thought struggles against being "enlettered" in...