White Walls

Collected Stories

By Tatyana Tolstaya
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell and Antonina W. Bouis

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

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.

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Reviews

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 Reviews

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

Also see:

The Slynx By Tatyana Tolstaya Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell In Tolstaya's vaudevillian-dystopian novel, set 200 years after an apocalyptic disaster destroys Russia, a lowly scribe is elevated to a life of privilege and becomes the bibliophile from hell. "A densely woven, thought-provoking fantasy"—Kirkus Reviews

Soul By Andrey Platonov Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson and Eric Naiman Introduction by Robert Chandler Afterword by John Berger Andrey Platonov is one of Russia's finest post-revolution novelists, and this definitive and newly translated collection of his works positions him amongst the greatest of twentieth-century writers. On Robert Chandler's translation, The Observer wrote, "Rarely does literature come this close to being music."

Masters of the Short Story Collection Love in a Fallen City, White Walls, Paris Stories, and Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

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