White Walls: Collected Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781590171974)

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.

Author: Tatyana Tolstaya
ISBN-10: 1590171977
ISBN-13: 9781590171974
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Language: English
Published: 04/17/2007
Pages: 416
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.04w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2007 pg. 49
Publishers Weekly 02/05/2007 pg. 39
Library Journal 04/15/2007 pg. 80
Entertainment Weekly 04/20/2007 pg. 66
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/05/2007 pg. 29