Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 288 p.

Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 288 p.

Boston. 2003. January 2003. Houghton Mifflin. 1st American Edition. Very Good

Boston. 2003. January 2003. Houghton Mifflin. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0618124977. Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell. 278 pages. hardcover. Cover: Luba Lukova. keywords: Europe Russia Literature Women Translated World Literature. DESCRIPTION-In what remains of Moscow some two hundred years after ‘the Blast', a community persists in primitive, ridiculous, and often brutal circumstances. Mice are the current source of food, clothes, and commerce as well as humor. Owning books in this society is prohibited by the tyrant, who plagiarizes the old masters, becoming his people's sole writer. One of the tyrant's scribes, Benedikt, is the main narrator of THE SLYNX. He is in love with books as objects but is unable to derive any meaning or moral benefit from them. In the dystopian world of her satirical first novel, Tatyana Tolstaya addresses lust, cruelty, egotism, and ignorance through Benedikt's distorted eyes. Throughout the novel lurks the Slynx, the imagined catlike creature whose fearsome, shadowy presence threatens the mice and the humans alike. As Pearl K. Bell wrote of Tatyana Tolstaya on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, ‘The blazing vitality of [her] imagination, the high-spirited playfulness. place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists. ' David Remnick has called her ‘the most promising of all the ‘post-Soviet' writers. She sounds like no one else. ' A great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, Tatyana Tolstaya was born in St. Petersburg. She is the author of two collections of stories and of PUSHKIN'S CHILDREN: WRITINGS ON RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2001, two major Russian literary awards. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and other publications. After teaching at Princeton University and for many years at Skidmore College, she now lives in Moscow. Jamey Gambrell has been translating Tatyana Tolstaya's fiction and non-fiction since 1990. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. inventory #33158.