Almost Two Kilograms of Words

Aleksei Polyarинов writes prose (the novel «Center of Gravity» was published in 2018), translates David Foster Wallace’s texts, and writes notes about his favorite writers, gathered in this book. In it, Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, and others appear not as readerly icons, but as living people united by the ability to juggle genres and remove barriers between «high» and «low» literature.

Contents
Preface
✕
How I read David Foster Wallace’s «Infinite Jest»
Plot or something like that
Wallace, a miracle of memory
Post-irony of fate
David Markson: a teacher of attentiveness
Prohibiting is forbidden: Thomas Pynchon’s «Inherent Vice»
Don DeLillo: language and terror
«American(a)» (1974)
«Names» (1984)
«White Noise» (1986)
«The Scales» (1988)
«Mao II» (1991)
Underworld (1997)
«Cosmopolis» (2003)
«Falling» (2005)
Zero K (2016)
Culture and tragedy: September 11, Beslan, and «Nord-Ost»
Lorrie Moore before and after 9/11
Philip Dick and his Professor Frankenstein
A test for empathy
The myth of Prometheus
The banality of evil
Where cyberpunk came from: androids, wires, and Pynchon
James Tiptree—Jr.
«Plus» by Joseph McElroy
«True Names» by Vernor Vinge
Stop milking Orwell and start living
«Generation A» by Douglas Coupland
«The Dervish House» by Ian McDonald
«Peripheral Devices» by William Gibson
Three utopias by Aldous Huxley
Bohumil Hrabal: compressed literature
First reason
Second reason
Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky: escape into a book
△
Julian Barnes: genre as a device
«Metro-land» (1980): a coming-of-age novel
«Flaubert’s Parrot» (1984): a biography
«A History of the World in 10½ Chapters» (1989): a historical chronicle
«How It Was» (1991): objectivity
«England, England» (1998): postmodernism
«Nothing to Be Afraid Of» (2008): autobiography
Kazuo Ishiguro: how to tame banality
«The Artist of the Floating World» (1986)
«The Remains of the Day» (1989)
«The Unconsoled» (1995)
«Never Let Me Go» (2005)
«The Buried Giant» (2015)
Stephen King: work in the twilight zone
«The Stand» (1978)
«Pet Sematary» (1979)
«It» (1986)
«The Dark Half» (1989)
«How to Write Books» (2001)
Abraham Verghese: white clothing
Marlon James: noise and brilliance
Hanya Yanagihara: to let it be known you’re not alone
Ayn Rand: an amputation of self-irony
Ian McEwan: the spherical writer in a vacuum
Martin Amis vs Douglas Coupland
Sergei Solovyov’s «Adam’s Bridge»: a novel in khaki colors
◯
Charlie Kaufman: expanding space
0
1…
2. Cludge
3. The film as performance
Alan Moore: a long road from the ghetto to the avant-garde
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
William Gibson: a portrait of the artist in virtuality
Agrippa
Burroughs, scissors, paper
Gibson is an artist
Thomassons
Who is Martin McDonagh
«Fargo», Noah Hawley, and the problem of the main character
«Pale Fire»: Nabokov’s metanovel
David Mitchell and the art of not being an asshole
☐ curriculum vitae
How I became a reader
The Reader’s Manifesto (instead of an afterword)