Description

The always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street. In “Kollwitzstrasse,” as the narrator muses on former East Berlin’s new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. She worries that sugar’s still sugar-but why lecture him, since he’s already dead? Then white feathers fall from her head and she seems to be turning into a crane . . . Pure white kittens and a great Russian poet haunt “Majakowskiring”: the narrator who reveres Mayakovsky’s work is delighted to meet his ghost. And finally, in “Pushkin Allee,” a huge Soviet-era memorial of soldiers comes to life-and, “for a scene of carnage everything was awfully well-ordered.” Each of these stories opens up into new dimensions the work of this magisterial writer.

Publisher Review

"Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within." -- The New York Times "Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman." -- Rivka Galchen - The New York Times Magazine "Tawada's strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own." -- The New Yorker "These stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history that's written into the urban landscape." -- Publishers Weekly