White Walls
Tatyana Tolstaya
New York Review Books
"Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." &#8211;<i>Time</i><br>Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories&#8212;with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair&#8212;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.<br><i>White Walls</i> 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, <i>On the Golden Porch</i> and <i>Sleepwalker in a Fog</i>, along with several...</br></br>