Slynx

<b><i>New in Paperback</i></b> <p/>A postmodern literary masterpiece. -<i>The Times Literary Supplement</i> <p/>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. <p/> Tatyana Tolstaya's <i>The Slynx</i> reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov's <i>Pale Fire</i> and Burgess's <i>A Clockwork Orange</i> <i>The Slynx</i> 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.