White Walls
Collected Stories
$40.12
- Paperback
416 pages
- Release Date
15 June 2007
Summary
Tatyana Tolstaya’s short stories—with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair—established her in the 1980s as one of modern Russia’s finest writers. Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O’Brien has called Tolstaya “an enchantress.” Anita Desai has spoken of her work’s “richness and ardent life.” Mixing heartbreak and humor, dizzying flights of fantasy and plunging descents to earth, Tolstaya is the…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781590171974 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1590171977 |
| Author: | Tatyana Tolstaya, Jamey Gambrell |
| Publisher: | New York Review Books |
| Imprint: | NYRB Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 416 |
| Edition: | Main |
| Release Date: | 15 June 2007 |
| Weight: | 420g |
| Dimensions: | 127mm x 203mm |
| Series: | New York Review Books (Paperback) |
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Critics Review
“Tolstaya’s voice is utterly her own, incorporating comic exaggeration, sly satire, bursts of lyricism and whimsy to intoxicating effect.” —National Post (Canada)
“Tolstaya demonstrates an impressive range in these 23 stories…[that encompass] political satire, flights of surrealism and realistic urban and domestic dramas, nearly all set in the Soviet era…Children, old folks and the struggling in-betweens–Tolstaya sees into all their hearts. Remarkable” —Kirkus
Tolstaya has a wholly distinctive voice, a quirky yet lyrical voice that blurs the line between poetry and prose, visionary magic and plain, old-fashioned description….She is an enormously gifted writer.
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Tolstaya offsets layers of exquisitely constructed language with the colloquial and the idiomatic and in a similar way layers the commonplace with the supernatural. The creation of a brilliant jumble of motley metaphors is her gift – not plot, trajectory, or the arc of a story, but the plunge into the middle of dazzling verbiage, her bright universe.” —The Boston Phoenix
Praise for Tolstaya:
“Tolstaya is “considered by many critics and writers to be the foremost writer of her generation, a miniaturist whose stories combine the linguistic stardust of Vladimir Nabokov and the emotional wisdom of Anton Chekhov.” —The Washington Post
“If you can imagine a Magic Realist Chekhov, you’re getting close, but her voice is all her own.” —Alan Bilton, Nation.Cymru
Tatyana Tolstaya
Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad and comes from an old Russian family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. She studied at Leningrad State University and then moved to Moscow, where she continues to live. She is also the author of Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians.
Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. Her translations include Marina Tsvetaeva’s Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917-1922 and Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice, published by NYRB Classics on December 2006.
Antonina W. Bouis’s most recent translation from the Russian is Edvard Radzinsky’s Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar.
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