"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.

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.

These twenty pieces address the politics, culture, and literature of Russia with both flair and erudition. Passionate and opinionated, often funny, and using ample material from daily life to underline their ideas and observations, Tatyana Tolstaya’s essays range across a variety of subjects. They move in one unique voice from Soviet women, classical Russian cooking, and the bliss of snow to the effect of Pushkin and freedom on Russia writers; from the death of the czar and the Great Terror to the changes brought by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin in the last decade. Throughout this engaging volume, the Russian temperament comes into high relief. Whether addressing literature or reporting on politics, Tolstaya’s writing conveys a deep knowledge of her country and countrymen. Pushkin’s Children is a book for anyone interested in the Russian soul.

‘Everything in this generous writer’s hands is vivid and alive.’ – Joy Williams

From one of contemporary Russia’s finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories, her first to be translated into English in more than twenty years.

Tolstaya’s ecstatic, witty and witchy imagination is in full force in autobiographical stories of delivering telegrams in Soviet Russia, conducting an affair with a man who may or may not exist, imagining a world without Italy (‘Nothing, nothing exists – there is no pasta, no Fellini, no pizza...) and, in the central story, recounting memories of summers spent in the family dacha and a time lost forever.

Beginning in Soviet Russia and setting off across the globe from Italy to France, Crete to America, this is a masterful collection by a brilliantly original writer.