The review copy I got of Cow Eye Press’s Twelve Stories of Russia: A Novel, I Guess doesn’t bear author A.J. Perry’s name anywhere on the cover, spine, or back cover. His name does appear on the title page though. A.J. Perry is probably Adrian Jones Pearson, author of Cow Country, also published by Cow Eye. Adrian Jones Pearson is probably not Thomas Pynchon. Here’s Cow Eye’s blurb:
When an eager American moves to Moscow to teach Russians the difference between the and a, he begins what will ultimately become a six-and-a-half-year descent into the murky entrails of language, culture, and the world’s greatest metro system. Part surrealistic travelogue, part historical serendipity, Twelve Stories is at its most enduring as a fanciful rumination on the elusiveness of words.
Twelve Stories of Russia was originally published in Moscow by the independent publisher GLAS, where it quietly gained a following among expats and locals alike. Unique in its appeal to both sides of the linguistic and cultural divide, the work has remained largely unknown beyond Russia. Now, almost a generation after its narrator’s lively quest for the word that changes and is changed, this emphatic “novel, I guess” is being released to a wider audience for the first time, its subject matter as universal and its themes as timely as ever.
Biblioklept 