Victor Pelevin is "the onlyyoung Russian novelist to have made an impression in the West" (<em>Village Voice</em>). <em>A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia</em>,the second of Pelevin's Russian Booker Prize-winning short storycollections, continues his Sputnik-like rise. The writers to whom he isfrequently compared--Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and JosephHeller--are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires insociety's deadening protocol. <br /><br />"At the very start of the thirdsemester, in one of the lectures on Marxism-Leninism, Nikita Dozakinmade a remarkable discovery," begins the story "Sleep." Nikita'sdiscovery is that everyone around him, from parents to televisiontalk-show hosts, is actually asleep. In "Vera Pavlova's Ninth Dream,"the attendant in a public toilet finds that her researches intosolipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. In the title story, ayoung Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forestwho can transform themselves into wolves. As <em>Publishers Weekly</em>noted, "Pelevin's allegories are reminiscent of children's fairy talesin their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary soulstossed helplessly among them." Pelevin--whom <em>Spin</em> called "a masterabsurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of thingshuman"--carries us in <em>A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia</em> to a land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.