Aetherial Worlds

(Paperback)

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A collection of stories about love, death, freedom, childhood, loneliness, the dreamlike nature of art, and the truth behind fiction, written over the last decade and now translated into English for the first time.
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.

'Everything in this generous writer's hands is vivid and alive.' - Joy Williams

Author Bio

Tatyana Tolstaya lives in Moscow. For twelve years, she was the co-host of The School for Scandal, a popular talk show on Russian television covering culture and politics. She is also the cofounder of a creative writing academy in Moscow. She has written for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Five of her books, including her novel The Slynx, have been translated into English.