Walker on Water

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A woman cultivates a knack for walking on water, but is undermined by her husband's brain, which he removes each night when he returns home from work; a couple overcomes the irksome mischief of the gods; a skeptical dragon wonders what sex is all about: this is the world of Kristiina Ehin. From the 2007 British Poetry Society Popescu prize winner for European poetry in translation: a series of comic, surreal adventures. Kristiina Ehin's quirky voice takes each story directly from the dream state, at times stubborn and resistant, at other times masochistically compliant. Ehin offers up modern folktales in which the very nature of our human identity is at stake-rampant with images and archetypes both new and old, and mediated by the abrupt changes we can only experience in dreams. KRISTIINA EHIN is a highly acclaimed performer of her poetry, prose and drama in Estonian as well as English. This is her first book of stories to be published in the U.S. In her native Estonia, she has published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories and a retelling of South-Estonian folk tales. She has written plays, as well as poetic radio broadcasts. She has won Estonia's most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala-a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent living as a nature reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia's north coast. In the UK, she has published six translated books of poetry and three of prose.

Reviews

"The pages drip in rich images and complex emotions in Kristiina Ehin's wildly imaginative and surrealistic collection Walker on Water. It's Etgar Keret meets Aimee Bender meets Michael Cisco meets Aesop. It's three-headed twins, a woman who inadvertently bites the arms off her husbands, and a Life Story who has a pesky Brain's Monkey. It's a wholly original and revolutionary read." --Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and A Head Full of Ghosts "Wow! I love this book!" --Mark Mothersbaugh, lead singer of Devo "Sharp, jarring, and darkly funny, the stories in Walker on Water move seamlessly and defiantly between the real and the surreal, reinventing folklore, redefining fiction, and daringly reexamining relationships." --Susan Steinberg, author of Spectacle "Kristiina Ehin's stories are metaphors for emotional events, usually ordinary ones like falling in or out of love, but they are sometimes very original metaphors, interesting as fiction in their own right... Kristiina Ehin encourages us to interpret her work while simultaneously hinting that interpretation is not important."- Madeleine LaRue, Three Percent "...a strange and effective work to behold."-Alexander Helmintoller, ZYZZYVA "It's a wild ride. And a uniquely feminist one. Ehin's angle on sex, marriage, commitment is refreshingly unromantic. Lovers are interchangeable, easily replaced, all with the same name. This book exists in a culture which feels, amazingly, outside of the patriarchy, outside of heteronormativity. This is the most exciting thing about Ehin: she doesn't play by the rules. Walker on Water does not feel like a response, a statement, a backlash against something. It is its own game and it does not care what you think a marriage is supposed to look like."-Maya Lowy, Quaint Magazine