This pair of novellas, Escape Hatch and The Long Road Ahead, was published in Russia in 1991 and by Ardis in 1996, marking Russian Booker prize winner Vladimir Makanin's first publication in English. A skilled post-modernist, Makanin, in these two gripping and dystopic works, shows himself to be steeped in both the strong storytelling tradition of the great nineteenthcentury Russian writers and the Surrealist attitude of Soviet and post-Soviet writers.