In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing would reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man refuses to let go of the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He never knew the boy, yet he learns Polish to communicate with his dybbuk. A high ranking German officer conceives of a plan to kill Hitler after witnessing a mass execution of Jews in Eastern Poland.
Through Krall's adroit and journalistic style, her reader is thrown into a world where love, hatred, compassion, and indifference appear in places where we least expect them, illuminating the implacable logic of the surreal.
"It is precisely the difficult path [Krall] takes toward her topic that has made some of these texts masterpieces."
-- "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (on "Dancing at Other People's Weddings")
"Heartbreaking, strange . . . and marvelously told."
-- "Die Zeit" (on "Proofs of Existence")

Celebrating the first ten years of the Writers in Translation Programme Writers in Translation, established in 2005 and supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England, champions the best literature from across the globe. To mark the programme's tenth anniversary, English PEN and Pushkin Press present Life from Elsewhere: Journeys Through World Literature - ten new essays by leading international writers, with an introduction by award-winning novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. These illuminating, invigorating pieces reflect on the question of identity, both personal and political, in a many-frontiered world. Alain Mabanckou writes on how the Congo remains his umbilical cord, Andres Neuman on growing up in Argentina, Chan Koonchung on the impossibility of defining China, Israel's Ayelet Gundar-Goshen on a meta-fictional encounter between writer and translator, Samar Yazbek on post-revolutionary Syria, Asmaa al-Ghul on how every experience in Palestine is linked to occupation, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi on the defiance of literature in the face of Iran's revolution, Hanna Krall on the lasting effects of the Holocaust in Poland, Andrey Kurkov on the dead and living languages of the Caucasus, and Turkey's Elif Shafak on the necessity of a cosmopolitan and diverse Europe.