Synopses & Reviews
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 hes 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 hes happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And hes 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.
Review
"Though her short fiction combines a Chekhovian talent for character development with an Isaac Babeln like economy of prose, The Slynx is a complex, deeply rewarding masterwork about a man preserving the charred remains of Russian high culture." The Washington City Paper
Review
"The post-nuclear world is not so different from what many readers might imagine — a mutant race has emerged, mice are an important food group, and books are banned. And to make life for the proletariat even harder, a murderous creature called the slynx is preying on the city's workers. Benedikt seems to live an almost charmed life as one of the dictators scribes, plagiarizing liberally to make Kablukov the creator of all things wonderful and wise. Then he develops a taste for knowledge, and realizes he must be the revolution." School Library Journal
Review
"Tolstaya offsets layers of exquisitely constructed language with the colloquial and the idiomatic and in a similar way layers the commonplace with the supernatural. The creation of a brilliant jumble of motley metaphors is her gift — not plot, trajectory, or the arc of a story, but the plunge into the middle of dazzling verbiage, her bright universe." The Boston Phoenix
About the Author
Born in Leningrad, Tatyana Tolstaya comes from an old Russian family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. She studied at Leningrad State University and then moved to Moscow, where she continues to live. She is also the author of
Pushkins Children: Writings on Russia and Russians.
Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. Her translations include Marina Tsvetaeva's Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917–1922 and Vladimir Sorokin's Ice, published by NYRB Classics on December 2006.