| Memoirs of a Polar Bear Contributor(s): Tawada, Yoko (Author), Bernofsky, Susan (Translator) |
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ISBN: 081122578X ISBN-13: 9780811225786 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: November 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary - Fiction | Historical - General - Fiction | Biographical |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 2016022379 |
| Physical Information: 0.7" H x 5.3" W x 7.9" (0.60 lbs) 288 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son--the last of their line--is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away... Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen." |
Contributor Bio(s): 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.Tawada, Yoko: - Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then moved again to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal.Bernofsky, Susan: - The translator of Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser, among others, Susan Bernofsky is currently working on a biography of Walser. |