The Book of Anna

In this continuation of Anna Karenina’s legacy, Russia simmers on the brink of change and the stories that have long been kept secret finally come to light.

Saint Petersburg, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the vivid portrait that the tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts Anna wrote just before her death, which open a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairy tale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapon, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, plan protests that embroil the downstairs members of the Karenin household in their plots and tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa tells a polyphonic and subversive tale of the Russian revolution through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work. 

Publication date: April 14, 2020 

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 200 pages 

ISBN: 9781566895774

Carmen Boullosa—a Cullman Center, a Guggenheim, a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and a Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las ArtesFellow—was born in Mexico City in 1954. She’s a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, and artist, and has been a professor at New York University, Columbia University, City College—City University of New York, Georgetown, and other institutions. She’s now at Macaulay Honors College—City University of New York. The New York Public Library acquired her papers and artist books. More than a dozen books and over ninety dissertations have been written about her work.

Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders, dedicated to publishing the world’s best literature translated into English. Her translation of Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize. She won the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation for her work on Boullosa’s El complot de los Románticos.

A Words Without Borders Most Anticipated Book of 2020

“Ms. Boullosa’s conceptual trick is to stage a collision between the dream life of the novel and the hard realities of politics. . . . The conceit drops the largely private, domestic story into the wider stream of history. Tolstoy would have hated this sort of intellectual game playing, but the subversion is perhaps even more fun for that. No surprise, it all ends with an explosion.”

—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“An absurdist tour de force.”

—Kirkus

“Drawing together servants, diplomats, anarchists, seamstresses and aristocrats at the eve of the Russian Revolution, Boullosa brings heightened eroticism, feminism, and liberation to Tolstoy’s imagined world.”

—Lauren LeBlanc, Observer

“[A] succinct yet electrifying homage to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.”

—World Literature Today

“[A] slim, playful sequel set in the early twentieth century that is deeply attuned to the concerns of the twenty-first.”

—Chicago Review of Books

“Boullosa offers an original perspective on this Russian classic that may light the subversive spark lying dormant within.”

—Ms. Magazine

“Boullosa tips the notion of fiction on its head.”

—Buzzfeed

“[A] luminous translation by Samantha Schnee.”

—Ploughshares

“[The Book of Anna] will surely become a modern classic.”

—Paperback Paris

“An innovative delight.”

—The Book Slut

“[C]lever and entertaining, with vivid characters and an absorbing story.”

—Rebecca Hussey, Book Riot

“A delightfully original and enjoyable book—Russian literature seen through Latin American eyes, and made into something new.”

—Salman Rushdie

“Historical and yet uncannily actual, readerly and yet deeply writerly, The Book of Anna is a much-needed reminder of the performative power of fiction in unjust and turbulent times.”

—Barbara Browning

“A beguiling return to the world created by Tolstoy. This beautiful translation takes Anna Karenina’s story a step further, showing how a single tragedy ripples across generations.”

—Elliot Ackerman

“Comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy, are all blended flawlessly. The result is a delicious, spicy literary borscht.”

—Phillip Lopate