In this playfully designed dual language edition, Rachel Shihor's stories – published here for the first time in the original Hebrew – appear alongside Ornan Rotem's translation into English.
Shihor offers a medley of aphorisms, flash fiction, and short stories, carving out a slice of the world in which Kafka would feel at home. The characters that inhabit this world – reckless she-goats, morose fish, somnambulistic theologians, poignant old ladies, dying dictators, and dead poets, to name just a few – have nothing in common save for the fact that they instruct us on the human condition. Available in Ornan Rotem's translation (who also added typograms to go along with the text) these edifying stories, with all their sadness and humour, are a writer's tour de force and a reader's delight.
In 2008, Sylph Editions published Rachel Shihor's Days Bygone in Cahier 7.
The Times Literary Supplement April 2014
Mona Gainer-Salim: feature article in Asymptote
Deborah Smith: review in Music and Literature.