Once, Vlad Snegir—an up-and-coming sci-fi writer and a frivolous young man—learns that now he is a knight of the Order of the Holy Bestseller. Thinking it a bad joke, Vlad is mistaken. Because ahead of him were nine very peculiar rounds of “process,” friendship with the Silver Harpy, becoming the Best-of-the-People, meeting the Book Worm, and a business proposal: “kill the hero.” The novel, devoted in many ways to the secrets of literary creation, is strange, wonderful, unexpected—an “optimistic tragicfarce” soaked through with poetry and deeply personal.