Stalin is Dead: Stories and Aphorisms on Animals, Poets and Other Earthly Creatures

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.