Three Streets
$14.95

Three Streets

Brand: New Directions
Current Stock:
UPC: 9780811229302
Gift Wrapping: Gift Wrapping Available
Authors: Yoko Tawada (Author), Margaret Mitsutani (Translator)
Out of stock

THIS BOOK WILL BE RELEASED ON: June 30, 2020

  • Hardcover: 64 pages
  • Publisher: New Directions (June 30, 2020)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0811229300
  • ISBN-13: 978-0811229302
  • Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 9.2 inches

Yoko Tawada―winner of last year’s National Book Award―presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin

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 the 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 glows, and opens up into new dimensions the work of this magisterial writer. 

Reviews

“Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.”
- The New York Times

“Magnificently strange. 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

About the Authors

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.

Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.

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