The Paris Review

Staff Picks: Jai Paul, Journalists, and Just Policies

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © K. Dubiel.

How to describe Olga Tokarczuk’s ? Unlike her Man Booker International Prize–winning novel , —first published in Poland in 2009 and newly translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones—has a plot. It follows Janina Duszejko, an amateur astrologer and former engineer-turned-teacher, and the series of murders that occur over the course of a winter in a remote Polish town near the Czech border. Unlike Mrs. Duszejko, a vegetarian who fondly refers to local deer as “Young Ladies” and who, alongside her former pupil Dizzy, likes to translate the poetry of William Blake for fun, the murder victims are all men, all crude, and

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