Aetherial Worlds

'Everything in this generous writer's hands is vivid and alive.' - Joy Williams From one of contemporary Russia's finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories, her first to be translated into English in more than twenty years. Tolstaya's ecstatic, witty and witchy imagination is in full force in autobiographical stories of delivering telegrams in Soviet Russia, conducting an affair with a man who may or may not exist, imagining a world without Italy ('Nothing, nothing exists - there is no pasta, no Fellini, no pizza...) and, in the central story, recounting memories of summers spent in the family dacha and a time lost forever. Beginning in Soviet Russia and setting off across the globe from Italy to France, Crete to America, this is a masterful collection by a brilliantly original writer.

Tatyana Tolstaya is the great grandneice of Leo Tolstoy. Since the 1980s, she has enjoyed a reputation as one of Russia's foremost original literary voices. The TLS hailed her first novel, The Slynx, a postmodern literary masterpiece of the same stature as Gogol's Dead Souls and Nabokov's Pale Fire, while Joseph Brodsky called her 'the most original, tactile, luminous voice in Russian prose today.' She lives in Moscow. She has written for New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.