"Sorokin, global literature's postmodern provocateur, is both a savage and satirist and a consummate showman." --Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review

"[Sorokin's] disorienting prose forces the mind to react--to focus, to sharpen--and urges us to be on guard against revered forms and the literary conventions of authority." --Harper's

"Sorokin is widely regarded as one of Russia's most inventive writers." --The New York Times

"For American readers today, already getting sci-fi shell-shocked by war news, political crime news, medical news, ... this helps spotlight (without a narrator and without stage directions), how we read, how we avoid, how we survive." --Bruce Andrews

"Socialist Realism has been tried and found guilty. Guilty of annoying edification, stifling clichés, propagandistic lies voiced by its stock characters, and fear of the body in all its messy manifestations. In Dispatches from the District Committee, Vladimir Sorokin acts as its executioner. Each short story is a Grand Guignol performance, in which Soviet style is condemned to a gruesome death. Don't feel sorry for Socialist Realism; just lean back and enjoy its just deserts in Max Lawton's masterful translation." --The Untranslated

"Sorokin's books are like entering a crazy nightmare, and I mean that as a compliment ... He was able to find the right vocabulary with which to articulate the truth." --Gary Shteyngart

"Sorokin's sudden exposure is long overdue as he is probably both the most acclaimed and the most controversial author in Russia today, hailed by critics as a 'living classic' even as his subject matter takes the tradition of Russian grotesque into areas Gogol or even the Stalin-era absurdist Daniil Kharms never dared venture." --Daniel Kalder, Publishing Perspectives