Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya

Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya

Playful and poetic . . . A foxy, original writer. Memory fuses with wonder, and wonder with worship. --The Wall Street Journal

Marvelously vivid, perfectly tuned. . . Tolstaya is well known in Russia as a brilliant and caustic political critic, but her memories of her Soviet childhood have a tender, personal quality. --The New York Times Book Review

Grimly hilarious ... Everything in this generous writer's hands is vivid and alive ...Tolstaya is divinely quotable--slangy, indignant, lyrical, crude...It's all sublime...the swerve and cackle, the breeziness and dark depths...the torrents of language and the offhand perfect touch...She has been compared to Chekhov. Absurd...Tolstaya barrels by him and knocks him in the ditch. --Joy Williams, Bookforum

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

Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette break; a man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls apart; a child glimpses heaven through a stained-glass window. With the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own, Tolstaya transmutes the quotidian into aetherial alternatives. These tales, about politics, identity, love, and loss, cut to the core of the Russian psyche, even as they lay bare human universals. Tolstaya's characters--seekers all--are daydreaming children, lonely adults, dislocated foreigners in unfamiliar lands. Whether contemplating the strategic complexities of delivering telegrams in Leningrad or the meditative melancholy of holiday aspic, vibrant inner lives and the grim elements of existence are registered in equally sharp detail in a starkly bleak but sympathetic vision of life on earth.
A unique collection from one of the first women in years to rank among Russia's most important writers.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781524732776
ISBN 10	152473277X
Title	Aetherial Worlds
Author	Tatyana Tolstaya
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Knopf Publishing Group
Year published	2018-03-20
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.