"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 work's "richness and ardent life." Mixing heartbreak and humor, dizzying...

"A postmodern literary masterpiece." -The Times Literary Supplement

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...