Series: Storybook ND Series

Maman was exigeante—there is no English word—and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified. Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais...

A certain writer ("past sixty, enjoying 'a certain renown'") strolls through the old book market in a Buenos Aires park: "My Sunday walk through the market, repeated over so many years, was part of my general fantasizing about books." Unfortunately, he is suffering from writer's block. However, that proves to be the least of our hero's problems. In the market,...

"That woman who killed the fish unfortunately is me," begins the title story, but "if it were my fault, I'd own up to you, since I don't lie to boys and girls. I only lie sometimes to a certain type of grownup because there's no other way." Enumerating all the animals she's loved—cats, dogs, lizards, chickens, monkeys—Clarice finally asks: "Do...

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,...

Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle Entering the Madness of Others and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed, this high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fuelled by the idées fixe of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name—Mr Herman Melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too...

Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius. The title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man during the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only...