White Walls

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 combination of imagination and unapologetic sympathy.

ISBN 1590171977   Pages 416 ISBN13 9781590171974 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc   Weight (grammes) 417 Imprint New York Review of Books Classics   Published in New York Format Paperback   Series title New York Review Books (Paperback) Publication date 29 Jun 2007   Height (mm) 203 Translator Jamey Gambrell   Width (mm) 128 Library of Congress 2007005450   Spine width (mm) 23 DEWEY 891.7344   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

		Loves me, loves me not		3
		Okkervil River		17
		Sweet Shura		29
		On the golden porch		41
		Hunting the wooly mammoth		51
		The circle		63
		A clean sheet		77
		Fire and dust		99
		Date with a bird		115
		Sweet dreams, son		129
		Sonya		141
		The Fakir		151
		Peters		175
		Sleepwalker in a fog		193
		Serafirm		235
		The moon came out		243
		Night		257
		Heavenly flame		267
		Most beloved		283
		The poet and the muse		309
		Limpopo		325
		Yorick		387
		White walls		391
		See the other side		397

"Tolstaya's voice is utterly her own, incorporating comic exaggeration, sly satire, bursts of lyricism and whimsy to intoxicating effect." --"National Post" (Canada) "Tolstaya demonstrates an impressive range in these 23 stories...[that encompass] political satire, flights of surrealism and realistic urban and domestic dramas, nearly all set in the Soviet era...Children, old folks and the struggling in-betweens-Tolstaya sees into all their hearts. Remarkable" -"Kirkus" "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" Praise for Tolstaya: Tolstaya is "considered by many critics and writers to be the foremost writer of her generation, a miniaturist whose stories combine the linguistic stardust of Vladimir Nabokov and the emotional wisdom of Anton Chekhov."-"The Washington Post"

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