Where Europe Begins: Stories

Author: Yoko Tawada
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811223515
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of the world's most innovative contemporary writers. 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.

Where Europe Begins

Author: 多和田葉子
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811215152
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
"In these stories' disparate settings - Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany - boundaries blur and shift between the physical and metaphysical, creating a fragmented world where a city or even the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, 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."--Jacket.

Where Europe Begins

Author: Yōko Tawada
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217026
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
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.

The Naked Eye

Author: Yoko Tawada
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811223507
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
“Tawada’s slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency.”—Michael Porter, The New York Times A precocious Vietnamese high school student — known as the pupil with “the iron blouse”—in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism,” she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town in West Germany. After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor—and though “the Berlin Wall was said to be more difficult to break through than the Great Wall of China” — she escapes on a train to Moscow . . . but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, broke, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) loses herself in the films of Catherine Deneuve as her real adventures begin. Dreamy, meditative, and filled with the gritty everyday perils of a person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjected to some vampire-like skin experiments), The Naked Eye is a novel that is as surprising as it is delightful—each of the thirteen chapters titled after and framed by one of Deneuve’s films. “As far as I was concerned,” the narrator says while watching Deneuve on the screen, “the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.” By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story and viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of both dancer and dance.

Scattered All Over the Earth

Author: Yoko Tawada
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811229297
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the 2022 National Book Award Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.” As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Yoko Tawada
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811220370
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 65

Book Description
A schoolteacher tells her class a fable about a princess who promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. Strangely, a doglike suitor then appears to court the teacher. Much to the chagrin of her friends, an odd romance ensues - simmering with secrets, chivalry, and sex.

The Last Children of Tokyo

Author: Yoko Tawada
Publisher: Portobello Books
ISBN: 1846276713
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
Yoshiro thinks he might never die. A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan's many 'old-elderly'; men and women who remember a time before the air and the sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe promted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. He may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson - born frail and prone to sickness - might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro's sagacity to keep Mumei alive. As hopes for Japan's youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure - might Yoshiro's great-grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?

D-Day

Author: Doug Murray
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 1435840097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 49

Book Description
The largest seaborne invasion in history began on June 6, 1944, with overnight parachute and glider landings, massive air attacks and naval bombardments, and an early morning amphibious assault on the beaches of Normandy, France. For two months the battle raged through France, final resulting in the liberation of Paris in August, as Allied forces put yet another nail into the coffin of Nazi Germanys fate.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Author: Yoko Tawada
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225798
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
The Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers—who happen to be polar bears 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.”

Europe's Last Summer

Author: David Fromkin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307425789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it surprised a European population enjoying the most beautiful summer in memory. For nearly a century since, historians have debated the causes of the war. Some have cited the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; others have concluded it was unavoidable. In Europe’s Last Summer, David Fromkin provides a different answer: hostilities were commenced deliberately. In a riveting re-creation of the run-up to war, Fromkin shows how German generals, seeing war as inevitable, manipulated events to precipitate a conflict waged on their own terms. Moving deftly between diplomats, generals, and rulers across Europe, he makes the complex diplomatic negotiations accessible and immediate. Examining the actions of individuals amid larger historical forces, this is a gripping historical narrative and a dramatic reassessment of a key moment in the twentieth-century.