Мы вышли покурить на 17 лет

Mikhail Elizarov is a prose writer, musician, author of the novels Earth (National Bestseller Award), Librarian (Russian Booker Award), Pasternak and Cartoons, collections Nails (shortlist Andrey Bely Prize), “Cubes”.
“Elizarov himself and the direction, and evaluation criteria, and God, and the king, and the hero. It is emphatically paradoxical and aggressively provocative. His lyrical hero is impudent, handsome, a bodybuilder, but at the same time helpless and defenseless, like a child. From brutality to tenderness, he has one step, which he does constantly, therefore he is constantly "led and writhing", in the words of N. S. Leskov. Each story in the collection is good in its own way. They are about love, about betrayal, about loneliness, about travel and about a hopeless experience of a fight with the world, which will defeat you anyway. (Pavel Basinsky)