The five stories explore the self-destructive streaks of her subjects: a young married couple, sinking into boredom; a young girl in a Russian immigrant family suffers from her step-father's hostility; a Tel Aviv journalist infects his lover with Aids; an intelligent young woman tells her life story as an inmate in a psychiatric hospital; a successful fashion photographer, working between bouts of bulimia and self-mortification.
Kimchi's characters talk about themselves in an idiomatic, uninhibited language, sometimes coarse, sometimes violent. The rough force of these stories and their protagonists assign the author a very distinctive place in Israeli literature today.
Translated by Yael Lotan.
About the Author
 ALONA KIMCHI was born in Russia in 1966 and emigrated to Israel with her family in 1972. She graduated from Beit Tzvi Theatre School and began an acting career, then turned to writing. This collection of short stories, originally published in Hebrew as Ani Anastasia in 1996, was awarded the prestigious ACUM Prize for Literature. Kimchi lives in Tel Aviv, working in the theatre and as a journalist.
Israeli critics acclaimed her work: one called it a kind of "linguistic laboratory" and another described the language as "fluent, vulgar and sometimes manic". "Each of the stories astounds in its own particular way," wrote the reviewer in Iton Tel Aviv, "exposing another kind of unhappiness or misery, yet all have a quality of acute, venomous humour and superb verbal brutality."
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The Critics Praise:
“Alona Kimchi’s first book is an intense reading experience. Each of the stories astounds in its own particular way, exposing another kind of unhappiness or misery, yet they all have an added quality of acute, venomous humor and superb verbal brutality.”
ITON, TEL AVIV
“The words have their own rhythm. Kimchi succeeds in bringing them to life. They are read with fluency, as if possessed by frantic movement.”
HA’ARETZ
“A beautiful, surprising collection of stories…Kimchi has wonderful language, no affectations, tight, not dependent upon clichés.”
YEDIOT AHARONOT
“Five stories, all written in the first person, all stories of profound pain, all of them convincing and the most convincing of all is the polished writer.”
MA’ARIV
“A raw and gripping group of stories…translated from the Hebrew by Yael Lotan with a real streetwise swagger.”
THE INDEPENDENT, LONDON
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