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Book Cover for: Where Europe Begins: Stories, Yoko Tawada

Where Europe Begins: Stories

Yoko Tawada

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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: May 17th, 2007
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 6.72in - 4.87in - 0.63in - 0.45lb
  • EAN: 9780811217026
  • Categories: Short Stories (single author)Literary

About the Author

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 was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books--stories, novels, poems, plays, essays--in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy.

Praise for this book

A spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities.--Victor Pelevin
Only the most profound reverence, I felt, could do justice to this writer and this work.--Wim Wenders
An undeniably superb, even breathtaking short story collection about life spent in the in-between by the Japanese-born, German-domiciled, multi-dimensioned Tawada.-- "Asian Week"
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.-- "The New York Times"
In Tawada's work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one's own.--Rivka Galchen "The New Yorker"