Where Europe Begins – Stories (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Tawada, Yoko; Bernofsky, Susan; Selden, Yumi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811217027 ISBN 13: 9780811217026

Publisher: New Directions, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

A spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities.--Victor Pelevin

In Tawada's work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one's own.--Rivka Galchen

An undeniably superb, even breathtaking short story collection about life spent in the in-between by the Japanese-born, German-domiciled, multi-dimensioned Tawada.

Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency. Each one sustains a masterly balance between the tenuous but meaningful connections of dreams and the direct, earthy storytelling of folk tales.

Only the most profound reverence, I felt, could do justice to this writer and this work.--Wim Wenders

About the Author

Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes. Last year her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0811217027
• ISBN 13: 9780811217026
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224