FICTION

MEMOIR OF A RUSSIAN PUNK by Edward Limonov (Grove Weidenfeld: $18.95; 312 pp.). Edward Limonov, the “bad boy” of Russian literature, already has two installments in print about his life as a young adult; this time the protagonist, Eddie-baby, is age 15. He’s a hard-drinking boy surrounded by punks in a bleak, poor, hopeless neighborhood, the workers’ district of Kharkov in the Ukraine. People keep telling Eddie-baby he’s special, and even as he roams the streets drinking, robbing and beating people up, he realizes that he thinks more, reads more and knows more than his pals. Besides, he writes poetry. All of this keeps him a step above his boorish peers, and luckily, he lived to write about it.