The Slynx (New York Review Books Classics)

New in Paperback A postmodern literary masterpiece. The Times Literary Supplement Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isnt one to complain. Hes got a jobtranscribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybeand though he doesnt enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least hes 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 hes happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And hes managedat least so farto steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond. Tatyana Tolstayas The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokovs Pale Fire and Burgesss A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russias past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.