{"product_id":"9781250074836","title":"Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNamed a Best Book of the Year by \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e(London) \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia's most controversial figures\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: \"Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes. He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter. It's a dangerous life, an ambiguous life: a real adventure novel. It is also, I believe, a life that says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about all our history since the end of the Second World War.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo Eduard Limonov isn't fictional-but he might as well be. This pseudobiography isn't a novel, but it reads like one: from Limonov's grim childhood to his desperate, comical, ultimately successful attempts to gain the respect of Russia's literary intellectual elite; to his immigration to New York, then to Paris; to his return to the motherland. \u003ci\u003eLimonov\u003c\/i\u003e could be read as a charming picaresque. But it could also be read as a troubling counternarrative of the second half of the twentieth century, one that reveals a violence, an anarchy, a brutality, that the stories we tell ourselves about progress tend to conceal.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Picador","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50078843076848,"sku":"9781250074836","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781250074836","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}