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.