"Tolstaya's voice is utterly her own, incorporating comic exaggeration, sly satire, bursts of lyricism and whimsy to intoxicating effect." --National Post (Canada)

"Tolstaya demonstrates an impressive range in these 23 stories...[that encompass] political satire, flights of surrealism and realistic urban and domestic dramas, nearly all set in the Soviet era...Children, old folks and the struggling in-betweens–Tolstaya sees into all their hearts. Remarkable" –Kirkus


Tolstaya has a wholly distinctive voice, a quirky yet lyrical voice that blurs the line between poetry and prose, visionary magic and plain, old-fashioned description....She is an enormously gifted writer.

— Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
   

“Tolstaya offsets layers of exquisitely constructed language with the colloquial and the idiomatic and in a similar way layers the commonplace with the supernatural. The creation of a brilliant jumble of motley metaphors is her gift – not plot, trajectory, or the arc of a story, but the plunge into the middle of dazzling verbiage, her bright universe.” –The Boston Phoenix

Praise for Tolstaya:

Tolstaya is "considered by many critics and writers to be the foremost writer of her generation, a miniaturist whose stories combine the linguistic stardust of Vladimir Nabokov and the emotional wisdom of Anton Chekhov."–The Washington Post