Tatyana Tolstaya

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated LiteratureLonglisted for the PEN Translation Prize In this dazzling collection of stories from one of Russia's most important writers, ordinary realities--and our yearnings to transcend them--lead to miraculous otherworlds. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife. A man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls apart. A child glimpses heaven through a stained-glass window. Tolstaya's tales--rendered with the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own--transmute the quotidian into aetherial wonders. As these stories explore politics, identity, love, and loss, they cut to the quick of the Russian psyche even as they lay bare human universals. Whether contemplating the intricacies of telegram delivery in Leningrad or the meditative melancholy of holiday aspic, Tolstaya limns the stark elements of existence and our vibrant inner lives in an extraordinary vision of life on earth.

Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons explores the ageless conflict between generations through a period in Russian history when a new generation of revolutionary intellectuals threatened the state. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by Peter Carson, with an introduction by Rosamund Bartlett and an afterword by Tatyana Tolstaya. Returning home after years away at university, Arkady is proud to introduce his clever friend Bazarov to his father and uncle. But their guest soon stirs up unrest on the quiet country estate - his outspoken nihilist views and his scathing criticisms of the older men expose the growing distance between Arkady and his father. And when Bazarov visits his own doting but old-fashioned parents, his disdainful rejection of traditional Russian life causes even further distress. In Fathers and Sons, Turgeneve created a beautifully-drawn and highly influential portrayal of the clash between generations, at a time just before the end of serfdom, when the refined yet vanishing landowning class was being overturned by a brash new breed that strove to change the world. Peter Carson's elegant, naturalistic new translation brings Turgenev's masterpiece to life for a new generation of readers. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett discusses the novel's subtle characterisation and the immense social changes that took place in the 1850s Russia of Fathers and Sons. This edition also includes a chronology, suggested further reading and notes. If you enjoyed Fathers and Sons, you might like Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Classics.'One of the first Russian novels to be translated for a wider European audience. It is a difficult art: in this superb new version, Peter Carson has succeeded splendidly' Michael Binyon, The Times 'If you want to get as close as an English reader can to enjoying Turgenev, Carson is probably the best' Donald Rayfield, The Times Literary Supplement

A New York Review Books Original "Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." -Time 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 natural successor in a great Russian literary lineage that includes Gogol, Yuri Olesha, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. White Walls is the most comprehensive collection of Tolstaya's short fiction to be published in English so far. It presents the contents of her two previous collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with several previously uncollected stories. Tolstaya writes of lonely children and lost love, of philosophers of the absurd and poets working as janitors, of angels and halfwits. She shows how the extraordinary will suddenly erupt in the midst of ordinary life, as she explores the human condition with a matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy.

New in Paperback "A postmodern literary masterpiece." -The Times Literary Supplement Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn't one to complain. He's got a job--transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe--and though he doesn't enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he's not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he's happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he's managed--at least so far--to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond. Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov's Pale Fire and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia's past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.