Nastya
Short fiction by Vladimir Sorokin.
Baffler Archives: Stories
Columns
The Ark
“I know you’ll make a good apostle for the Lord.”
Flounder
Would not some good Christian give succor in an Emergency?
Bipolar Tendencies
“Give me one reason not to nuke this hole into next Tuesday.”
The Last Sign
There was no woman there. I am sure of that.
The Wyrm
Understand, it had far more neurological matter (you’d call it “brain tissue”) than a whale, a dolphin, a pig, or a human, but that material was put together in a very different way from yours, mine, a dog’s, an arthropod’s, arachnid’s, mouse’s, elephant’s, ...
Margaret Lewis
The old age community looped a fern-frosted lake flanked on both sides by identical little brown brick bungalows. His delivery truck was headed in the wrong direction. Numbers on the mailboxes going down instead of up. He believed he could get to her if he went a little farther ...
Goodnight Baby
Chase loved his bandmates like brothers. Riley, floppy-haired and gangly, manned the fake instruments—melodica and glockenspiel, donkey jaw and rattle—free-playing like a kid in music class. Matt, compact and forever frowning, kept a factory-correct drumbeat, the seatbelt ...
Indescribable Colors
On the palm-sized screen it looks curiously real, like something he’s already seen. She slouches in the drugstore aisle, clawing the skin on the back of her hands, sunglasses black and gleaming in the halogen daylight. This is the girl: a bored blonde, her head at once too big ...
Magus of the Ariegé
Let’s call him the Magus. He never called himself that but his followers did behind his back, the ones who hung on every word in his Amsterdam glory days.
He was, in the years before the last century turned, the toast of the local underground, the man who led hundreds on ...
Town of Stairs
The town of stairs was built around a square at the bottom of a deep canyon. The town of stairs kept people in little pods, which branched off from the square, at the top of the canyon. Everyone lived alone in their little pods, and walking up someone else’s staircase was a ...
The Family Nude
1. April 1988: A Long-Distance Phone Call
Capitalist families are all alike; every communist family is communist in its own way.
My family’s ways of being American communists responded to the changing fortunes of Marxism in the United States over the decades. (And yes, I was ...