The world is getting stranger and stranger. Surprising and unpredictable short stories from a Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.
Where does the feeling of strangeness come from? Is strangeness a quality of the world, or does it hide more within ourselves? The word “bizarre” comes from the French bizarre, which means “strange,” “peculiar,” but also “surprising.”
And that is precisely what Olga Tokarczuk’s latest book is—astonishing and beyond all categories. Ten short stories, each set in a different space: in Volhynia during the Swedish invasion, in contemporary Switzerland, in distant Asia, in imaginary places.
The variable rhythm of the short stories keeps the reader in suspense, so that for not a moment are they sure what will happen on the next page. The author throws them off balance, pushes them out of their comfort zone, and shows that the world is becoming less and less comprehensible. Elements of the grotesque, black humour, fantasy, and horror reveal that in reality, nothing is as it seems at first glance.
What they wrote about the book Bizarre Stories
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2018 was awarded to Olga Tokarczuk for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.
The Nobel Prize in Literature Committee
After the exceptional success of The Books of Jacob, the expectations of both readers and critics were huge. But Tokarczuk made a smart move and, after almost four years, published a work modest in scope, consisting of ten completely different stories. Bizarre Stories, however, share a common feature in their celebration of the strangeness of the world, which echoes the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition of incredible stories, at the beginning of which stands Edgar Allan Poe.
Krytykapolityczna.pl
Humour, melancholy, a changing atmosphere, a desire to merge with nature—Olga Tokarczuk has written miniatures, each of which could become the inspiration for a full-length novel, and some even for a film.
Poranny.pl
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Olga Tokarczuk
Poland's most-read prose author for many years.
She studied psychology at the University of Warsaw and worked as a psychotherapist in Wałbrzych. Her first novel, The Journey of the Book-People (1993), earned her the Polish Book Publishers' Association award as well as a large readership. Her greatest success was her novel Primeval and Other Times (1996), for which she was awarded the prestigious Kościelski Award and the readers' choice award as part of the Nike prize. Her next two novels, House of Day, House of Night (1998) and Playing on Many Drums (2001), also received the Nike readers' prize. Since 2008, she has been teaching creative writing at the University of Opole.
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