About the Author

Genrikh Sapgir (1928-1999), an avant-garde poet and children's writer, was a member of the famous Lianozovo group in the 1960s and 1970s, which brought together such dissident poets and artists as Brodsky, Zverev, Ilya Kabakov, Oscar Rabin and Ernst Neizvestny. Sapgir's "adult" poems were hardly ever published in the pre-perestroika times. Like his predecessor Daniel Kharms and other writers of the absurd before him, he made a very successful career writing for children.
To break through to his readers he started writing his poems on shirts, which he exhibited at art exhibitions together with his artist friends' paintings. These "sonnets on shirts" have remained popular to this day. Winner of the Khlebnikov and Znamya awards, he is widely published and immensely popular in Russia today.
Grigory Kruzhkov is prolific in many literary fields, he is a well-known poet, translator, children's writer, literary historian, and essayist. He compiled and translated an anthology of English fairy-tales and rhymes entitled Big Ben Tales, which was awarded a diploma of the International Board on Books for the Young (IBBY) in 1996.
Alexander Selin, born in 1960, grew up in the little town of Volzhsk on the Volga. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics Engineering and worked as a physicist for eight years, leaving this profession with a number of publications and discoveries to his credit. During this time he wrote short plays, which he staged himself with theatre companies in Moscow and St Petersburg. He also writes scripts for films and television, and humorous short stories, published in literary journals and recited by comic actors.

Reviews

"A whimsical quality runs through these stories ... Inevitably, Gogol makes his influence felt in many of these stories." --"Moscow Times"

"Another Glas--another triumph!" --"Moscow Tribune"

"These stories, which are amusing and unique, act like a playground swing, each one flinging itself into direction different from the others...." --"Boston Book Review"