Library

"Weird Tales" is the latest collection of novels by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Prize winner for literature (awarded in 2019). The collection of novels is composed of ten stories: the green child in the forest, the various cans left behind by the mother after her death, the professor who was accidentally involved in a death case, "I" went to visit my sister who had undergone transfiguration surgery, the mysterious mummy in the monastery, and Monodice who resurrected after death every year... Each story is weird and absurd. It is difficult for you to guess what will happen on the next page, but under the weirdness there seems to be clues of human life hidden. The novel collection combines folklore, fairy tales, science fiction, religious stories and other elements to examine Polish history and people's lives. One year after the collection of novels was published, Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book also includes Tokarczuk's speech "The Gentle Narrator" when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature at the Swedish Academy and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

"The Soil of Bones" is the latest novel by Tokarczuk, the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature. The film of the same name won the Alfred Bauer Award (Silver Bear Award) at the Berlin International Film Festival. The novel is permeated with a chilling sense of humor and poignant reflections on people, nature, and animals. The protagonist Yanina is an old woman who is proficient in astrology, loves the poetry of William Blake, and is passionate about animal protection. She lives in a seclusion in the snow-covered mountain forest on the Polish border. Yanina gives strange nicknames to everyone she knows. They are "Bigfoot", "Ghost" and "Good News", and her dogs are called "little girls". Suddenly one day, the neighbor "Bigfoot" had a deer bone stuck in his throat and died at home. Since then, murders have occurred one after another...