The collection "The Pipe and Other Labyrinths" contains two novelettes by Valeriy Khazin, a well-known modern writer, a member of the Commonwealth of Literary Men of Russia, a nominee of the I.P.Belkin award "for the best Russian-language novelette" (novelette "The Catalogues of Telegonus", 2004). "The Pipe and Other Labyrinths" is a sample of high-quality intellectual prose, which is characterized by a variety of genres (from a mythological narration to mystic parables) and the author's exquisite sense of style. "The Pipe" is an original instructive parody of "tales of treasures" and adventure novels. Three inhabitants of an out-of-the-way Russian town quite unexpectedly find a "treasure" which changes all their lives. In the basement of the block of flats where they live they suddenly discover an oil pipe. The lucky chaps decide to make use of it, but the unexpected windfall is followed by a number of weird events, which, being a mixture of tragedy and farce, are for sure nothing but direct consequences of human folly, greed and carelessness. The novelette "The Catalogues of Telegonus" is an idiosyncratic cycle of "restored myths", which is connected with the Trojan cycle, the Argonauts and the Tauromachy. The plots of widely known myths are closely related here to other ones, which are not just rare, but actually almost esoteric and sometimes merely invented by the author.