Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jan 2013
176 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon's neighbor - who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders - their fates converge in an ominous and darkly beautiful web.
Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the last page.
"The thrills are sometimes cheap and the connections between stories membrane thin, but Ogawa makes it count with her precision and dedication to bringing the vision full-circle." - Publishers Weekly
"[A]lthough the stories may be perceived as gruesome, the author paints each tale exquisitely. Well-written. " - Kirkus
"Yoko Ogawa is an absolute master of the Gothic at its most beautiful and dangerous, and Revenge is a collection that deepens and darkens with every story you read." - Peter Straub
"Every act of malice glows creepily against the plain background. It's a book that ought to be distributed to every fiction-M.F.A. candidate who tends to overwrite: Ogawa is an expert in doing more with less." - New York Magazine
"Involves murder, desire, jealousy, love, and torture...Creepy but compelling experimental horror that stays with you long past the book's last page." - The Atlantic Wire
This information about Revenge was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Yoko Ogawa is the author of The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and Hotel Iris. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor has been adapted into a film, The Professor's Beloved Equation. She lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son.
Name Pronunciation
Yoko Ogawa: o-GAR-wa
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