Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Guardian

A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia’s most controversial figures.

Limonov tells the story of one of the most controversial and difficult figures in recent political history: Eduard Limonov, writer, political dissident, and enfant terrible of the highest order. In this unconventional biography, chameleonic journalist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère details Limonov’s chaotic and astonishing life, from his grim childhood to his desperate, comical, ultimately successful attempts to gain the respect of Russia’s literary intellectual elite. The book follows him as he emigrates to New York, then to Paris, before he returns to the motherland. Limonov could be read as a charming picaresque. But it could also be read as a troubling counternarrative of the second half of the twentieth century, one that reveals a violence, an anarchy, a brutality that the stories we tell ourselves about progress tend to conceal.