Elemental - (Calico) by Erika Kobayashi & Farkhondeh Aghaei & Andreas Moster & Dorota Brauntsch & Bakhiyar Ali & Tamar Weiss-Gabbay (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"A celebration of both storytelling and translation, Elemental is essential; a gift that opens up the pleasures of new worlds." --Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities

A family's heirloom stones unearth a story spanning war, illness, and radioactivity. A pipeline installed to protect a town from flooding results in a howling that disturbs the town's inhabitants. A political prisoner embarks on an epic flight toward freedom, literally blown like a kite in the wind.

A whirlwind of fantastic new writing from Japan, Iran, Norway, Germany, Madagascar, Iraq, Poland, and Israel, this collection of fiction and reportage maps the intimate, ongoing relationship between human civilization and the natural world. Do we set the limits on our existence? Or is it wind, water, fire, and earth that define--even control--us? Borrowing from eco-literature and mythology, Elemental unflinchingly takes up the earth.

Review Quotes

"A fantastic and deeply philosophical addition to Two Lines' Calico series of collected works in translation." --Booklist

"A lovely and sometimes disturbing exploration of the intersection of humanity and nature...[Elemental] offers an excellent selection of stories that differ in style, tone, and subject but unite around a common theme: what it is that we humans do to, and with, the world around us." --Strange Horizons

"Stone, earth, water, ice, wind, and burning heat. The stories here dig deep and unexpectedly into life's fundamentals--the elements and the passions--bringing into English, many for the first time, writers of stature from across the globe. A celebration of both storytelling and translation, Elemental is essential; a gift that opens up the pleasures of new worlds." --Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities

Praise for the Calico Series

"Marvelous...a credit to the art of both poets and translators." --Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth and co-translator of Joan Darc, by Nathalie Quintane, on Home

"This remarkable anthology of Chinese speculative fiction offers seven tales of societal responsibility and individual freedom.... By turns cryptic and revealing, phantasmagorical and straightforward, these tales balance reality and fantasy on the edge of a knife."--Publishers Weekly, starred review of That We May Live

"With enthralling and precise language, this first book in Two Lines Press' Calico series of collected translated literature impresses...This collection of speculative Chinese fiction is compelling and provocative, exploring the thin line between reality and absurdity. " --Booklist, starred review of That We May Live