 Victor Brook was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. After graduating from the College of Construction, he worked in Siberia. At the age of nineteen, he became a reporter for a newspaper in Novorossiisk (a town on the Black Sea) and began writing fiction. In 1966, he entered the Department of Journalism at the Moscow University; he earned a B.A. in journalism and later spent two years on assignment in India, representing the Ministry of Foreign Trade. After his return, the writer lived in a remote village in the North, writing stories about India and teaching history and English. In 1973, he returned to Moscow and took a job as an editor for the publishing house Molodaya Gvardiya . His attempts to publish his fiction in the USSR were unsuccessful because of the stories' non-conformist style and originality. In 1979, after years of surveillance by the KGB, three arrests, searches of his apartment, and interrogations of his friends, Brook emigrated from the Soviet Union. A few years later he started publishing his stories in Russian literary journals in Europe. He is the author of two books – The Fields of Lost Battles (Smolensk 1993) and A Veranda for Showers (Moskva 1999) , which include short stories, novellas and a novel Koza Roza . All these stories were originally written in Russian and, before coming out in book form, appeared in Russian magazines and literary journals Ogonyok, Stolitsa, Zolotoi Vek, Novoe Russkoe Slovo, and others. Before settling in South Florida, Brook lived in California, Vermont, and Upstate New York. Hotel "Million Monkeys" and Other Stories (2000) is the first translation of Brook's stories into English .
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