Subtly Worded and Other Stories

Reviews / Votes

[Teffi's work is] amazingly modern, as easy to devour, as, well, a box of chocolates -- Rachel Cooke * Observer * Made me fall in love... [Teffi] can write in more registers than you might think, and is capable of being heartbreaking as well as very funny. I wish she were still alive, and I could have met her. But then I realised she would have seen right through me. I can't recommend her strongly enough -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian * One of the great twentieth-century writers. At their best her short stories are to my mind the equal of Chekhov's. I doubt if anyone has written with such luminous clarity of what it means to live in a time of chaos * John Gray * Her range is as broad as her prose is buoyant * New Statesman * Teffi packs more humour and poignancy into six short pages than many novels manage in 600 * The Kompass * Teffi has been unjustly neglected. She deserves to be known outside of Russia and thankfully we have wonderful translators and publishers who can bring her work to us * Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings * A dream come true. As is always the case with Pushkin Press, the book itself is beautifully produced piece of work, and once again they have had the courage to take a chance with an unjustly neglected author... wonderfully strange, fiercely intelligent and side-splittingly funny * Upcoming4Me * A gifted satirist and social observer... possessed of a lightness of touch... her precise voice is her own and this mercurial volume is a singular prism to not so much a lost world as to a changing culture that learned to adapt without ever forgetting the past -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * Combines Jane Austen's nose for pretension and the gleeful, catty wit of a Wilde or a Waugh... Ultimately, though, it's what you find beneath the sarcasm and the critique that makes these stories so compelling... No matter how ridiculous her characters, Teffi always reserves a little bit of tenderness for them. Perhaps, she seems to be saying, with our thwarted hopes and petty logic, we are closer to the fools than we know -- Peter Beech * Russia Behind the Headlines * Jackson and her co-translators deserve high praise for the delicate modulations to preserve Teffi's tone throughout... Teffi's brilliance at capturing the dark comedy of her milieu should no longer prevent her from being recognized as an important European writer * TLS * Like Nabokov, Platonov, and many other great Russian prose writers, Teffi was a poet who turned to prose but continued to write with a poet's sensitivity to tone and rhythm. Like Chekhov, she fuses wit, tragedy, and a remarkable capacity for observation; there are few human weaknesses she did not relate to with compassion and understanding -- Robert Chandler * New Yorker * A volume of stories that could not be more aptly titled. Teffi was not only a great wit and an impeccable stylist, but one of the twentieth century's most perceptive and clear-headed observers. Subtly Worded is flawless - a true revelation -- Boris Dralyuk * Pen Atlas * Witty, acerbic, playful and profound, Teffi's tales are here again, and if there is any justice, they are here to stay * Minneapolis Star Tribune * The characters pop off the page with a flick of the pen. Teffi... turned out finely engraved sentences that achieved their effects economically -- William Grimes * New York Times * The stories gathered in this little volume radiate beauty and burst with the winking humor for which Teffi was always known... wonder-filled * Blogcritics * Virtually unknown in English until this series of translations by Pushkin Press -- Peter Pomerantsev * London Review of Books *