With a phantasmagorical, surreal style as brilliantly absurd as Gogol’s, Victor Pelevin writes of the wild chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a storage hut dreams of becoming a bicycle. “Hermit and Six-Toes,” “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream,” “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII,” and “Tai Shou Chuan USSR (A Chinese Folk Tale)” are the four stories by young Russian writer, Victor Pelevin, collected in this New Directions Bibelot edition.