shopping cart
Call us:  800-878-7323 HELP
McAfee SECURE helps keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams.
Powell's Q&A, Q&A | June 29, 2009

Janna Cawrse Esarey: IMG Powell's Q&A: Janna Cawrse Esarey



"I fell in love with Crosby, Stills, and Nash's song 'Southern Cross' when I was fifteen. By the time I got to college, 'I'm going to sail around the world someday' was sort of my pickup line." Continue »
  1. $10.50 Sale Trade Paper add to wish list

On Order

$24.00
HARDCOVER, NEW
Currently out of stock.
Add to Wishlist
Qty Store Section
- Local Warehouse Literature- A to Z


The Slynx

by Jamey Gambrell

The Slynx Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In what remains of Moscow some two hundred years after the ?Blast,? a community persists in primitive, ridiculous, and often brutal circumstances. Mice are the current source of food, clothes, and commerce, as well as a source of humor for Tatyana Tolstaya. Owning books in this society is prohibited by the tyrant, who plagiarizes the old masters, becoming his people?s sole writer. One of the tyrant?s scribes, Benedikt, is the main narrator of The Slynx. He is in love with books as objects but is unable to derive any meaning or moral benefit from them. Like the imagined, feared animal of this rollicking satirical novel?s title, Benedikt represents lust, cruelty, egotism, and ignorance. The Slynx and Benedikt are one.

Review:

"More than just a primitive people's boogeyman, the Slynx is the symbolic incarnation of the collective anguish of the citizens living in a despotic regime....a wildly inventive, extremely well-executed and powerful tale." Jean Charbonneau, The Denver Post

Review:

"The blazing vitality of [her] imagination, the high-spirited playfulness...place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists." Pearl K. Bell , New York Times Book Review,

Review:

"[T]he most promising of all the ?post-Soviet? writers...She sounds like no one else." David Remnick

Review:

"As tragic as it is funny, as upsetting as it is hopeful, The Slynx is a brilliant and fearless portrait of Russia, a nation cursed by its rulers and blessed by its literature. Count Tatyana Tolstaya as one of those blessings." Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Review:

"The Slynx contains almost everything: it is at once brutal and generous, specific and universal, dark and hilarious, classical and absolutely new." Jonathan Safran Foer

Review:

"[A] brilliantly poetic, impressionistic assault on its fondest pastoral pieties....It's serious fun." Ben Dickinson, Elle

Review:

"It is impossible to communicate adequately the richness, the exuberance, and the horrid inventiveness of this book. It must have been a nightmare to translate, and Jamey Gambrell has done a heroic job." John Banville, The New Republic

Review:

"A strikingly imagined first novel...A densely woven, thought-provoking fantasy."Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"In this extended fable, [Tolstaya] captures the Russian yearning for culture, even is desperate circumstances." Publishers Weekly

Review:

"With the publication...of The Slynx, [Tolstaya] will...be granted a place alongside her exalted countrymen Nabokov, Bulgakov, and Gogol." Bookforum

Review:

"Spellbinding futuristic novel." The New Yorker

Synopsis:

In what remains of Moscow some two hundred years after the “Blast,” a community persists in primitive, ridiculous, and often brutal circumstances. Mice are the current source of food, clothes, and commerce, as well as a source of humor for Tatyana Tolstaya. Owning books in this society is prohibited by the tyrant, who plagiarizes the old masters, becoming his people’s sole writer. One of the tyrant’s scribes, Benedikt, is the main narrator of The Slynx. He is in love with books as objects but is unable to derive any meaning or moral benefit from them. Like the imagined, feared animal of this rollicking satirical novel’s title, Benedikt represents lust, cruelty, egotism, and ignorance. The Slynx and Benedikt are one.

As Pearl K. Bell wrote of Tolstaya’s stories on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, “The blazing vitality of [her] imagination, the high-spirited playfulness . . . place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists.” David Remnick has called her “the most promising of all the ‘post-Soviet’ writers . . . She sounds like no one else.”

Synopsis:

In what remains of Moscow some 200 years after the "Blast, " a community persists in primitive circumstances. Owning books is prohibited by the tyrant, Benedikt, who is the main narrator of "The Slynx." Like the imagined, feared animal of this rollicking satirical novel's title, Benedikt represents lust, cruelty, egotism, and ignorance.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780618124978
Translator:
Gambrell, Jamey
Author:
Tolstaia, Tat'iana
Author:
Tolstaya, Tatyana
Author:
Gambrell, Jamey
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)
Location:
Boston
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Russian & Former Soviet Union
Subject:
Russia
Subject:
Moscow
Subject:
Russian fiction
Subject:
Satire, Russian.
Subject:
Distopias
Copyright:
Edition Description:
HARDCOVER
Series Volume:
1194
Publication Date:
January 2003
Binding:
Hardcover
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
288
Dimensions:
8.60x5.82x1.05 in. 1.02 lbs.

Other books you might like

  1. $14.00 New Trade Paper add to wish list
  2. $10.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

    Haruki Murakami
  3. $8.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    The Master and Margarita

    Mikhail Bulgakov
  4. $8.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Middlesex

    Jeffrey Eugenides
  5. $4.25 Used Hardcover add to wish list

    The Dogs of Babel

    Carolyn Parkhurst
  6. $16.95 Used Hardcover add to wish list

    Haunted: A Novel

    Chuck Palahniuk

Related Aisles

  • back to top

Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.