Meet Alex and Alex, as compelling a Russian portrait as the two sides of Raskolnikov. He is—or they are—a dark-caped anti-hero, conjoined twins stalking, counterfeiting, fleeing the iron curtain, delightfully innocent, seeking what everyone seeks: love, hope, and redemption.
“Marvelously original. . . . Zlotsky has done for conjoined twins what Günter 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, author of Love in a Dead Language
“Pure joy in language. . . . Nabokov’s Pale Fire mated with Finnegan’s Wake.” —Michael Drout, PhD, language scholar
“Twins and doubles exist on the literary landscape, but none like Alex and Alex. The essential truth of twinness: the appealing/repelling closeness; the macabre humor of what seems two bodies sharing one soul; the storytelling in stereowrapped in a warped fairytale surrealness like The Tin Drum mirrored in an Alice Through The Looking Glass circus madhouse. Throw in well-aimed puns, tongue-in-cheek-swipes at convention, a nontraditional monster hunt, and a surprise twist, and you’ve got the Alex-Alex experience.” –Michael Mirolla, author of Berlin
Dmitry Zlotsky was born in 1960, in Moscow. Having graduated from college, he began working as a research scientist. In 1989 his Boeing-built “Santa Maria” landed in New York. He lives in New Jersey where he spends his spare time inventing puzzles and writing poetry in Russian and prose in English.
