Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Yoko Ogawa; translated by Stephen Snyder
Picador Original / $14.00 / 176 pages
On Sale: January 29, 2013 (February 2013)
Fiction / Short Stories / Horror
For review copies (US and Canada only), please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com
PRAISE FOR REVENGE
“Yoko Ogawa is an absolute master of the Gothic at its most beautiful and dangerous, and REVENGE is a collection that deepens and darkens with every story you read.” —Peter Straub
“Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is a secret garden of dark, glorious flowers: silky, heart-breakingly beautiful… and poison to their roots.”—Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns
“Ogawa crafts 11 interlocking short stories with eloquent prose that belies the nature of the tales she spins…. With dark calm and disquieting imagery, the author leads readers on a journey of the macabre in a progression of tales that resound long after the last page is turned…. Ogawa’s writing is simple and effective, and her technique for merging the tales demonstrates her mastery of the written word… The author paints each tale exquisitely.”—Kirkus
“Weaving together the morbid tales of 11 unnamed narrators, prolific Japanese author Ogawa (Hotel Iris), a Shirley Jackson Award winner, presents an intense rumination on the precariousness of interconnected lives.”—Publishers Weekly
“Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is a delicious mosaic that concerns much more than its titular subject, as the messy human emotional spectrum gets exposed in 11 compulsively readable tales that become increasingly multilayered and interlocked.”—Shelf Awareness
“If creepy were a place, Ms. Ogawa has come up with many ways to get there… Even while punctuated [by] macabre flourishes her book maintains its restraint, like a dark alley that’s too quiet, or an insane person acting too calm.”—Susannah Meadows, The New York Times
“From Japan comes Revenge, a spine tingling volume subtitled Eleven Dark Tales, from Yoko Ogawa … These are shiningly sinister stories that grab you by the vulnerable back of the neck and don’t let go.”—ELLE
“Woven through the 11 interconnected tales is a thread of the grotesque, the macabre, the mournful.… Ogawa’s language is both spare and searingly precise, crystallizing the details of everyday existence and capturing the unexpected shock of the bizarre…. Readers willing to explore the murkier edges of the human psyche will not be disappointed.” —Associated Press
“Every act of malice glows creepily against the plain background. It’s a book that ought to be distributed to every fiction-M.F.A. candidate who tends to overwrite: Ogawa is an expert in doing more with less.”—New York Magazine
“[Revenge] erupts into the ordinary world as if from the unconscious or the grave…. A haunting introduction to her work… the overall effect is [that of] David Lynch: the rot that lurks beneath the surface.”—The Economist
“Japan’s best teller of macabre tales… Ogawa is such a master that she pushes the boundaries and suspends the mystery… You never know ‘why,’ only that humans are slaves to time, and we keep on with our lives so that someday we might understand.”—The Daily Beast
“Magnificently macabre … Ogawa is the Japanese master of dread … These tales are not for the faint of heart, but Ms. Ogawa is more “Masque of the Red Death” than she is The Ring. She elevates herself above any limitations of the genre she’s working in.” —The New York Observer
“The deeper you go into this book, the more the oddness ramps up, and the more you start to notice unsettling connections… Powerful and strange. The tangle of sadism and lonely anguish will sneak up on you.”—Charlie Jane Anders, io9
“Interwoven stories from Ogawa involve murder, desire, jealousy, love, and torture, making for creepy but compelling experimental horror that stays with you long past the book’s last page.”—The Atlantic Wire
“Revenge is about as elegant as horror gets, in both style and presentation. … an exceptionally well-done and well-balanced piece of horror-writing, disarmingly detached — and all the more unsettling for that.”—Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review
ABOUT REVENGE
Yoko Ogawa’s REVENGE: Eleven Dark Tales (Picador Original / February 2013 / ISBN: 978-0-3126-7446-5 / $14.00 / 176 pages), is a collection of macabre and fiendishly clever linked stories that flirt with the supernatural. Together they create a haunting tapestry of death—and the afterlife of the living.
An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before the lover can follow through on her crime of passion, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman—a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. When the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape.
The eleven eerie and absorbing stories in REVENGE draw together sinister forces and a cast of desperate characters that will leave you haunted after you close the covers.
YOKO OGAWA’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Harper’s Magazine. Since 1988, she has produced more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in several countries. In 2008 her novel The Diving Pool won the Shirley Jackson Award for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. Her novel Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010.
MORE INFORMATION
Cover image for download
Yoko Ogawa author photo for download (credit included in file name)
Stephen Snyder on Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, and the Business of International Literature at the Center for the Art of Translation
Books on Tap 