White Walls: Collected Stories
by Tatjana Tolstaja
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A New York Review Books Original "Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." -Time Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories--with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair--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 show more 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. 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 matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
These 'stories' are more like long prose poetry pieces, and many of them are very hard to unpick. Some are really just wordy evocations of a place, or of a memory - with creative use of syntax. There's some lovely sketches, and a couple of the longer pieces with some narrative energy behind them are really very beautiful.
While Tatyana Tolstaya’s prose is beautifully lyrical, her subject matter is rather depressing. No one is satisfied or happy at all in her stories. While there were one or two stories that I enjoyed, most of the stories were too heavy for my tastes. Also, the stories became more and more political, which made them more and more boring. This is one for the “Don’t Bother” pile, sadly.
If you liked stories about dying old people then this book is for you!
If you liked stories about dying old people then this book is for you!
very 🇷🇺, very 💭
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Author Information
61+ Works 2,031 Members
Tatyana Tolstaya---"the most original, tactile, luminous voice in Russian prose today," according to Joseph Brodsky---worked at various publishing jobs after graduating from Leningrad University and appeared on the Moscow literary scene in 1983 with the favorably received story "Loves Me, Loves Me Not." Her first collection, On the Golden Porch show more (1988), proved extremely popular. Soon afterward she came to the United States on the first of a series of visiting university appointments and has plunged actively into cultural life in this country: She writes for the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, The New Yorker, and other magazines, as well as for publications in Russia. Her forte is the short story, her writing distinguished by exuberance, a talent for description, a comic sensibility, and more than a touch of the surreal. For one reviewer, "the discrepancy between fondest desires and disappointing reality" lies at the core of her writing, which is "a fiction of vast possibility, propelled not by plot, but by a narrative voice that imaginatively conveys the ambiguities of her characters' inner lives" (Baltimore Morning Sun). Sleepwalker in a Fog (1991) is her second book. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- White Walls: Collected Stories
- Original publication date
- 2007
- Blurbers
- Kakutani, Michiko; Crispin, Jessa
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 891.7344 — Literature & rhetoric Asian Literature East Indo-European and Celtic literatures Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fiction USSR 1917–1991 Late 20th century 1917–1991
- LCC
- PG3489 .O476 .A2 — Language and Literature Slavic languages and literatures. Baltic languages. Albanian language Slavic. Baltic. Albanian Russian literature Individual authors and works 1961-2000
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 308
- Popularity
- 103,458
- Reviews
- 5
- Rating
- (3.78)
- Languages
- English, Russian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1
