Aetherial Worlds

“Playful and poetic... A foxy, original writer. Memory fuses with wonder, and wonder with worship." — The Wall Street Journal

“Marvelously vivid, perfectly tuned... Tolstaya is well known in Russia as a brilliant and caustic political critic, but her memories of her Soviet childhood have a tender, personal quality.”  — The New York Times Book Review

“Grimly hilarious... Everything in this generous writer’s hands is vivid and alive… Tolstaya is divinely quotable — slangy, indignant, lyrical, crude... It’s all sublime... the swerve and cackle, the breeziness and dark depths... the torrents of language and the offhand perfect touch... She has been compared to Chekhov. Absurd... Tolstaya barrels by him and knocks him in the ditch.” — Joy Williams, Bookforum

From one of modern Russia's finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories, her first to be translated into English in more than twenty years.