In this playfully designed dual-language edition, Rachel Shihor's stories-published here for the first time in the original Hebrew-appear alongside Ornan Rotem's English translation. Shihor offers a medley of aphorisms, flash fiction, and short stories, carving out a slice of a world in which Kafka would feel at home. The characters that inhabit this world-reckless she-goats, morose fish, somnambulistic theologians, and poignant old ladies, not to mention dying dictators and dead poets-have nothing in common save for the fact that they instruct us on the human condition. In her introduction, Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love, confirms, "Only a master could make such originality feel inevitable. The only question is why so few people have had the chance to read her." These edifying stories, with all their sadness and humor, are a writer's tour de force and a reader's delight.

Four excerpts from Rachel Shihor's novella Yankinton have been selected, and translated from the Hebrew for this cahier. These poignant and humorous tales are as much about the act of recollection as they are about the remembered Tel Aviv of the 1940s. In a playful and yet muted style, Shihor tells of the everyday life of a child beginning to grasp her surroundings. Six works by the painter David Hendler further explore the city.