Fox

The fox, the cunning shape-shifter of Eastern folklore, runs through six loosely linked chapters, a meandering personal fiction in which a first-person narrator asks how stories come about. It travels between Russia and Japan, across the mined fields of the Balkans and along American highways, from the 1920s to now, from Japanese shrines to the village of Kuruzovac, from Boris Pilnyak and Nabokov to dreary literary conference tourism. It is about writers and storytelling, literary betrayals, seductions and thefts, about minor characters and the chance shape of people's lives, and about a woman who longs to get away from her small town and find love. Along the way it mocks amateurism, provincial conventions and the rule of profit, drawing on the author's own experience of emigration.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

309 pages in the original

First published

2017 by Fraktura

Author's age

68 when first published

ISBN

9789532668704 (original)

9781940953762 (Open Letter, United States)