“Plot-oriented prose still exists and will continue to exist,” posits Shklovsky, writing in 1926, “but it has been consigned to the attic.” In its place, we have this work: part fiction, part memoir, and part critical theory. (It was previously published in 1977 in a limited edition.) The author employs a factory metaphor to appease his Marxist critics but remains aesthetically in sync with earlier formalist thought, focusing not on plot, characters, or the state, but on plot-oriented prose itself and its inability to capture the dilemmas of the modern artist. His three “factories” are the social institutions that have processed him as an artist and a person: childhood in gray St. Petersburg; Opoyaz, the creative-freedom consortium he helped found in his idealistic youth (otherwise known as the Russian formalist movement); and most significantly, the present constraints placed on his work by Bolshevik ideology. A must for serious lit-crit fans, this work is also annotated enough to make it enjoyable for anyone interested in the intellectual side of the Russian Revolution.