The Bridegroom Was a Dog (New Directions Pearls)

The Bridegroom Was a Dog (New Directions Pearls)

Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani (Translated by)
$10.95
Publication Date: November 27th, 2012
Publisher:
New Directions
ISBN:
9780811220378
Pages:
64

Description

Internationally acclaimed author Yoko Tawada's most famous — and bizarre — tale in a stand-alone, New Directions Pearl edition.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog is perhaps the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada’s most famous story. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from The New Yorker, who praised it as, “fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tale that has the dream quality of Kafka.”

The Bridegroom Was a Dog begins with a schoolteacher telling a fable to her students. In the fable, a princess promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. The story takes an even stranger twist when that very dog appears to the schoolteacher in real life as a dog-like man. They develop a very sexual, romantic courtship with many allegorical overtones — much to the chagrin of her friends.

About the Author

Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Magazine hailed her work as “magnificently strange.”

Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

Praise for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (New Directions Pearls)

Her masterpiece.
— Parul Sehgal - The New York Times

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