| Where Europe Begins: Stories Contributor(s): Tawada, Yoko (Author), Bernofsky, Susan (Translator), Selden, Yumi (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0811217027 ISBN-13: 9780811217026 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $14.36 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2007 Annotation: A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of the world's most innovative contemporary writers. "Where Europe Begins" presents a collection of startling new stories by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Moving through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams, and every-day reality, Tawada's work blurs divisions between fact and fiction, prose and poetry. Often set in physical spaces as disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany, these tales describe a fragmented world where even a city or the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author and the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Tawada playfully makes the experience of estrangement--of a being in-between--both sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Short Stories (single Author) - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| Series: New Directions Paperbook |
| Physical Information: 0.63" H x 4.87" W x 6.72" (0.45 lbs) 224 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Chosen as a 2005 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Where Europe Begins has been described by the Russian literary phenomenon Victor Pelevin as a spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities. In these stories' disparate settings--Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany--the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author, or the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a traveler on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Through the timeless art of storytelling, Yoko Tawada discloses the virtues of bewilderment, estrangement, and Hilaritas: the goddess of rejoicing. |
Contributor Bio(s): Bernofsky, Susan: - Susan Bernofsky is the acclaimed translator of Hermann Hesse, Robert Walser, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and the recipient of many awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation at Columbia University and lives in New York.Tawada, Yoko: - Yoko Tawada--"strange, exquisite" (The New Yorker )--was born in Tokyo in 1960 and moved to Germany when she was twenty-two. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the Tanizaki Prize. |