{"product_id":"toddler-hunting-and-other-stories-w-n-essentials","title":"Toddler Hunting and Other Stories (W\u0026N Essentials)","description":"Product Description\n\n\nAn immeasurably influential female voice in post-war Japanese literature, Kono writes with a strange and disorienting beauty: her tales are marked by disquieting scenes, her characters all teetering on the brink of self-destruction. In the famous title story, the protagonist loathes young girls but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. Taeko Kono's detached gaze at these events is transfixing: What are we hunting for? And why? Kono rarely gives the reader straightforward answers, rather reflecting, subverting and examining their expectations, both of what women are capable of, and of the narrative form itself.\n\n\nReview\n\n\nThere are resonances here with Tanizaki, but Kono's subversions feel somehow scarier, in part because of her deadpan prose and in part because she strikes at sacred paradigms of motherhood and femininity ―\nThe Wall Street Journal\n\n\nIt does a disservice to this collection of stories, which were originally published throughout the 1960s, to focus too much on its flashes of sadomasochism; but it's difficult not to start there. But the pleasure in Kono's work is not only, or even primarily, derived from its daring. These stories are also captivating in traditional ways ―\nNY Times\n\n\nThe fiery, beguiling stories in TODDLER HUNTING AND OTHER STORIES are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kono's writing is shocking, ominous, and subversive ―\nThe Paris Review\n\n\nLeft me shaken and in awe; they are incendiary, beautiful, and frightening confrontations of the lives we keep hidden from others ―\nGabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida\n\n\nJapanese master of the unsettling: Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction ―\nKirkus\n\n\nReminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's works, Kono's stories explore the dark, terrifying side of human nature that manifests itself in antisocial behaviour ―\nWorld Literature Today\n\n\nBook Description\n\n\nA captivating collection of pitch-black tales from one of the most important Japanese writers of the second half of the twentieth century - 'shocking, ominous, and subversive' The Paris Review\n\n\nAbout the Author\n\n\nTaeko Kono (1926 -2015) is one of the most important Japanese writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Oe Kenzaburo, Japan's Nobel Laureate, described her as the most \"lucidly intelligent\" woman writers writing in Japan, and the US critic and academic Masao Miyoshi identified her as among the most \"critically alert and historically intelligent.\" US critic and academic Davinder Bhowmik assesses her as \"...one of the truly original voices of the twentieth century, beyond questions of gender or even nationality.\"","brand":"W\u0026N","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39660571754581,"sku":"9781474619202N","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/b219a243-8216-4ea2-889d-36c662a71fb8.jpg?v=1638784580","url":"https:\/\/smeikalbooks.co.uk\/en-us\/products\/toddler-hunting-and-other-stories-w-n-essentials","provider":"smeikalbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}