The Slynx (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Tatyana Tolstaya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590171969 ISBN 13: 9781590171967

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2007

Synopsis

Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn't one to complain. He's got a job transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe and though he doesn't enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he's not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he's happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he's managed at least so far to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.
Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov's Pale Fire and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia's past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.

About this title

Review:

"a beautiful book ... intelligent and thought-provoking, and the kind of novel any bibliophile would relish reading."

--(Starburst magazine)

About the Author:

Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad in 1951 to an aristocratic family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. After completing a degree in classics at Leningrad State University, Tolstaya worked for several years at a Moscow publishing house. In the mid-1980s, she began publishing short stories in literary magazines and her first story collection established her as one of the foremost writers of the Gorbachev era. She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Known for her acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life, Tolstaya has also been the co-host of the Russian cultural interview television program School for Scandal. Both her novel, The Slynx and her collection of stories, White Walls, are published by NYRB Classics.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1590171969
• ISBN 13: 9781590171967
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304