Intourist poster for use in the USA, 1930s. The postcard reads, ‘ This is more than a pleasure trip - it is a voyage into a new world!’
This is the place to find news, recent reviews, information about different editions of Red Plenty, and (when relevant) a listing of events where I’m due to talk about the book. A short video interview with me is down below.
EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS
Graywolf Press’ American edition of Red Plenty was published on 14 February 2012. It can be bought here from Amazon US, or here from Barnes & Noble, or here from Powell’s.
A Kindle edition for the US is available here. Or (for contractual reasons too boring to go into) if you’re anywhere else on the planet, and you want to read it on a Kindle in English, you need the version which you can buy from Amazon UK here and Amazon Spain here. There is also an ePub edition, here.
Barnes and Noble are selling it as a NOOK book.
It can also be bought as an iBook from both the US and UK versions of the iTunes store.
The British paperback edition (Faber and Faber) is available at Amazon UK and they will ship it worldwide. You can buy it here.
The British hardback edition is still in print too.
A Dutch translation of the book by Toon Bohmen, De Rode Belofte, was published in June 2011 by Nieuw Amsterdam. Details are here, and it’s for sale here.
A Spanish translation by Catalina Martinez Munoz, Abundancia Roja, came out in October 2011 from Turner Libros. Details, including an extract in Spanish, are here. It can be bought here. There is now also a Spanish-language Kindle edition, here.
An Estonian translation by Andrus Maran, Punane Kullus, has just been published too, by Tanapaev. Details are here; it’s for sale here.
A Polish translation by Jan Dzierzgowski, Czerwony Dostatek was published by Muza at the end of March 2012. Details are here.
A German translation by Jan Valk, Rote Zukunft, was published by Rowohlt on 2nd April 2012. Details are here. An extract in German is here. It can be bought here.
The Russian translation by Anna Aslanyan, Strana Izobiliya, has just been published by Corpus (late April 2012) and should now be in bookshops. An extract in Russian, showing off the considerable beauty of Corpus’ type design, is here. (Click on the picture of the cover to read.) And you can buy it here.
An Italian translation will be published by Bollati Boringhieri, also sometime in 2012. Meanwhile, Section V Chapter 2 of the book can be found in Italian here.
A Turkish translation will be published by Domingo, date not yet decided.
NEWS and RECENT REVIEWS
The Crooked Timber seminar on the book has ended: 13 essays on Red Plenty in relation to economics, computer science, SF, fantasy, the historical novel, and the work of Vasily Grossman, with a response in three parts by me. The whole thing is neatly gathered here as a set of blog posts with comments, and can be downloaded here as a free, rather elegant ebook (in pdf, .mobi or .epub formats).
The extraordinary and beautiful piece of intellectual path-finding by Cosma Shalizi, on the question of whether an optimized planned economy in the Kantorovich mode is computationally feasible under any circumstances at all, is here; and his follow-up on his own blog, developing issues raised in the Crooked Timber discussion, is here.
In the New Left Review (paywall), Fredric Jameson calls the book ‘wonderful’, and says the ‘point... is certainly to flex the mind’s long-numb faculty of wondering, what if?’
In Russia, Galina Yusefovich in Itogi magazine calls it ‘a true epic -- exciting, ambitious and polyphonic’, which ‘returns to us a significant piece of our own past’.
