The Slynx (Paperback, Main)

"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 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 extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he' s managed-- at least so far-- to 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 Tolstaya' s "The Slynx" reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov' s "Pale Fire" and Burgess' s "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 Russia' s 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.