A collection of thirteen short stories translated from the Russian. The author is distantly related to Tolstoy (a great-grand-niece). In Loves Me, Loves Me Not, two little girls reflect back on their ugly nanny and how much they hated her.In Sweet Shura, a woman in her late 80’s tells a young visitor about her three husbands. But mostly she regrets the road not taken. At one time she bought a train ticket to leave one of her husbands to join a lover waiting for her at a distant station. At the l...

A collection of short stories by Tatyana Tolstaya and yes she is a descendant of Tolstoy. The stories are as follows:Loves Me, Loves Me NotOkkervil RiverSweet ShuraOn the Golden PorchHunting the Woolly MammothThe CircleA Clean SheetFire and DustRendezvous with a BirdSweet Dreams SonSonyaThe FakirPetersA wonderful set of stories about ordinary people their hopes, fears, wants and illusions and as one reviewer put it, “bittersweet melancholy”. The stories are atmospheric and reminded me more of Ch...

"Lev Adolfovich, sempre irónico, franzia os lábios, erguia as sobrancelhas e abanava a cabeça, as lentes muito finas dos óculos cintilando. 'Se uma pessoa morre, é por muito tempo; mas se uma pessoa é estúpida, é-o para sempre!'SonyaTatiana Tolstoi escreve muitíssimo bem e não envergonha os seus antepassados. Expressando-se com muitos laivos de humor e crítica social, mas também com melancolia e piedade, cria personagens excêntricas, desencantadas e decadentes de uma forma muito convincente e tr...

4.5/5Tolstaya's frame of reference is, as it was in the masterful The Slynx, the mating of imagination and reality. Neither is the nicer one, for the former is depression, fear, the worst breed of lie, while the latter is cold, starvation, and the unthinking forging ahead that keeps the means of thought blooded and bleeding. Child, woman, man, all follow a line between fate and fiction in their respective lives that all too often leads to the banal dead end. Petya was given a large bowl of ric...

The first thing that jumps out at me about Tolstaya is the sheer dynamism of her voice. She's not as manic as Miranda July, because she's more strategic about when to turn the mania off and switch to some serious lyricism (check out the title story, whose fluctuations in energy are pretty powerful), but it's still the sort of thing that might put a reader not used to the torrent-of-words style that strikes me as the dominant thing of the past several decades off. The second thing that jumps out

Querida Tatiana:¿Te importaría si decidiera acogerte en mis visiones? ¿Qué sentiría tu corazón al verse latir en mi pecho?

Tolstoya is the best least known Russian author today, and this first collection from her is perfect. I heard about her writing from the band Okkervil River, their name taken from a story in this volume. I trusted their judgement, finding them literary folk- to my great pleasure. This is swirling, elegant, depair riddled reading..dreamlike and beautiful, haunting even. There is no real way to talk about this collection without simply spewing adjectives everywhere, but this is truly well thought

A few words to describe this wonderful, dark short story collection; original, compelling, evocative, rich, creepy, mysterious, startling, overwhelming, claustrophobic, and important.

I didn't get what was going on at all but it was all so pretty. Kind of like Russia.

This is a bilingual review.----------------------------------------------Как и во всяком сборнике, здесь есть более и менее удачные рассказы; к счастью, среди первых попадаются настоящие жемчужины. Например, рассказ, давший имя всей книге, берёт за душу бесконечно правдоподобной картиной утраченного детства. На самом деле я вовсе не хотел быть взрослым!.. Поздно.Как ни странно, рассказы похуже портит тот же самый стиль, который делает лучшие лучшими. Видимо, сюрреализм надо отмерять с точностью

DNF. Just couldn't get into these stories. I wanted to hear a Russian voice but I felt I was reading another writer from the MFA club... the authenticity wasn't there.

I love her writing - after living in Russia, I find that few writers sum up the ecstasy of being, the chaos, and the mundane of Russian life like Tatianna Tolstaya. She has the voice of a freight train filled with brightly colored jelly beans.

Everyone must read this book. I met her once, and she was dreadful.

I had vaguely heard of Tolstaya and was planning to read 1-2 stories from this collection, but I ended up reading the whole book.Tolstaya has a very unusual style--prose poetry, is that a thing?--especially in stories like on On Golden Porch. And that's good, too, because at face value her stories sound pretty banal: A lonely man gets rejected by women. A woman feels life is passing her by. Children are mean to their nanny. And so on. Tolstaya's writing, humor, wit and sharp observation really e...

"No degrau de ouro" é um livro de contos, lindamente dolorosos, da autora russa Tatiana Tolstaya. Embora seja um livro de contos diversos entre si, existe uma linha condutora: a angústia. A angústia está presente de forma intermitente na vida dos personagens; uma dor aguda e incômoda.Tatiana Tolstaya constrói a maioria de seus contos mesclando o universo interior dos personagens (fluxo de consciência) e eventos externos que os cercam, imprimindo ritmo e aproximando o leitor das motivações desses...

Tatiana Tolstoi é uma escritora focada nos detalhes e, neste livro, esmiuça muito bem cada pormenor relativo a sentimentos. "O Alpendre Dourado" é uma conlectânea de contos, e cada história retrata sensações que provocam aquele sentimento conhecido de quando alguém faz algo que nos deixa desconfortáveis, a conhecida "vergonha alheia". Tatiana Tolstoi escreve sobre amor, mas também sobre ciúme, saudade, memórias, infância, ódios, tristezas. Expõe o ser humano sem piedade, e remete-nos para cada r...

I bought this book at a used book store with great hopes I'd discover a hidden unknown gem of Russian literature. It's a modern read - and like the worst of modern reads it's realism in it's most depressing and cynical state. I don't understand why many modern writers write about scandal and tragedy in a flippant manner. They treat their protagonists with disregard throwing them into depressing situations and then casually drop the floor out from under them to show it's always worse, until your

A very grim selection of stories that felt a bit repetitive by the end.

"Fire and Dust" elevates this to 5 stars.

Got this many years ago (in high school?) at a remainder discount book store in Gaithersburg for $1. One of the oldest books in my collection that I hadn't yet read.

Когда рассказы художественные - супер. Но много предисловий, отзывов, размышлений, которые похожи на курсовые с филфака, на любителя.

I have a particular liking for Slavic literature. In a previous review I raved about the short stories of Ekaterina Sedia and one of my favourite authors is the French Russian writer Andre Makine. To that list of excellent Russian writers I can now add Tatyana Tolstaya. They all share a way of portraying and seeing the world as hauntingly beautiful filled with people whose lives are doomed to disillusionment.The writer Tolstaya most reminds me of is not her famous grandfather but Chekhov. There

This book is so brilliant and funny, I put every other book aside to finish it, and ordered another by her: Pushkin's Children. Because I knew, after reading the Golden Porch, that whatever thoughts Tolstaya shares about Russians and Russian history will be keenly observant and honest about the good and the bad. Of course, that would require a separate review. As to '. . . Porch,' one seldom reads such a rambunctiously funny book without becoming annoyed. Tolstaya knows how to modulate her voice...

I'm having a hard time with these stories. I think they probably require more concentration than my half-asleep brain can muster on the train in the morning. Interesting tidbit I see on another review: the band Okkervil River takes its name from the short story of the same name in this volume. -------I think this is by a Skidmore professor, but it doesn't say she teaches there inside the book. Maybe she was just visiting for a year after this book was published. Or maybe I'm making this up.I sho...

3.6 stars.

Minha resenha deste livro aqui:http://lualimaverde.wordpress.com/201...

More great short stories from Ms. Tolstaya, most well-known in America for her New York Times book reviews and sojourns with the New Yorker.

Short stories by Tolstoy's great-grandniece. A bit like what you might expect if Donald Barthelme wrote in the style of Virginia Woolf.

1992 notebook: childhood, widows, old Russia; like the descriptions - the wind walks up from the south, the engineer with two beards...

70% of people on Gooreads rated this book 4 or 5 stars, so maybe I'm not in the target audience. Plenty of tangents that were excellently written but lost in some sort of overall incoherence.