Monster

Monster

Oil on Canvas

A Novel

Dmitry Zlotsky

A weirdly hilarious Russian fairy tale featuring conjoined twins, reminiscent of Gogol, Gunter Grass, and Nabokov.

"In this marvelously original novel, Zlotsky has done for conjoined twins what Gunter Grass did for midgets in The Tin Drum... A weirdly hilarious Russian fairytale composed with the comedic zeal of Gogol and the rhetorical brilliance of Nabokov."

-Lee Siegel, Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Love in a Dead Language

"In this modern-day, multi-limbed fairy tale, we meet Alex and Alex, a pair of lovelorn Siamese twins, whose "ability to observe objects from acute viewpoints allows for the perceiving of depth." The same could be said of Dmitry Zlotsky, who tells his story with a gleeful love of the double, the pun, the anagrammatic twining of language, and an uncanny ability to perceive the depth at the heart of allegory. The fate of Alex and Alex winds in and around that of Fairy, a double-hearted silent orphan from another land, drawing to its delicious and unexpected denouement with the economy and grace of Grimm, and the ghost of Alexander Afanasyev, whose spirit lives on in the monstrous body of Zlotsky's Alexes and in the glorious unfolding of his tale."

-Julie Carr, author of Sarah-of Fragments and Lines (2010); 100 Notes on Violence (2010); Equivocal; and Mead: An Epithalamion

"A pure joy in language explodes from every page of this remarkable book. Combining an acute phono-aesthetic playfulness with massive erudition in multiple languages, Monster, Oil on Canvas reads like what would result if Nabokov's Pale Fire mated with Finnegan's Wake and produced conjoined twins as offspring. Multi-lingual puns, an unforgettable prose style, subtle and witty references and a wild, twisting plot make Zlotsky's novel a unique literary achievement."
-Michael Drout, Audies (Audiobook Awards) nominee and author of How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century; Five volumes of Tolkien Studies; and "The Modern Scholar" lecture series

This spring, Leapfrog Press continues its LeapLit line with Monster: Oil on Canvas (Leapfrog Press; April 15, 2010; $15.95) by Russian-born Dmitry Zlotsky. Monster is both a thought-provoking, almost disturbing commentary on the human state and a wildly hilarious fairy tale sprinkled with linguistic puns.

Alex & Alex are mischievous and opinionated conjoined twins. Their life-full of double entendre, of duality and duplicity-is ruled by the prefixes bi and di.

‘Is it short for Alexei and Alexander?' we usually hear after the introductions.

‘No and no!' each of us denies emphatically.

Their youth is spent pursuing Love (L'ubasha), Hope (Nad'usha), and finally Faith (Vera). Budding artists-or so they believe-they steal a painting from the State Art Collection. They hide, then flee Russia in an ongoing quest for the doctor who can "single out our anatomical antinomy."

Meanwhile, Sophie and her husband Fodor, a doctor and art collector, travel to Moscow to adopt Fairy/Faith, a silent little girl. Fairy, who has the rare medical condition of a double heart, is also an artist, drawing always with two pencils, always in double lines that resemble one face hiding behind another. And while Alex & Alex become convinced that Fodor is the doctor of their dreams, it is Fairy who in her heart-her hearts-holds the answer for the twins: a future of love and life, two futures, divisible, divided, and touched with the ecstasy of loneliness.

A criminal caper entwined with a poignant international adoption story, Monster: Oil on Canvas will delight fans of fabulist comedy with its presentation, in contrasts of nightmarish and loving, tragic and hilarious, of the grand delusion in which we all live. Fifteen black-and-white drawings by Olga Zlotsky, a New York-based illustrator, art instructor and fashion designer, enhance the emotional intensity of the multiple story lines.

About the Author

Dmitry Zlotsky emigrated from Moscow to the United States in 1989, and now lives in Livingston, N.J. His short stories and poetry have been published in a number of Russian newspapers and magazines, and an extract from his novel Project Genesis appeared in Nuvein Magazine (2004) under the title "The Plagiarist."

MONSTER: OIL ON CANVAS • Dmitry Zlotsky

330 pages • ISBN: 978-1-9352480-9-5 • Trade paperback, $15.95

April 2010 • A LeapLit Book

Leapfrog Literature

Published by Leapfrog Press LLC

www.leapfrogpress.com

Distributed to the trade by

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

www.cbsd.com