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The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Literary icon Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies shares an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling and her homeland of the Dominican Republic.
“The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks us to consider if our tales will last forever or if they might one day be forever lost… What a blessing to have one of our finest writers assure us that indeed ‘we are in this story together.” —Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences
Meet the Author and Translator of Your Utopia
Bora Chung
Bora Chung is a writer of science fiction and generally unrealistic stories. Bora also translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean. She has published three full-length novels and four books of collected short stories in Korean. Among them, Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, both translated into English by Anton Hur. She likes dark and magical stories and stories about strong women who fight to survive in an unjust and violent world.
Anton Hur
Anton Hur was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and was subsequently raised in six different countries on four different continents, including British Hong Kong, Ethiopia, the United States, and Thailand, but spent most of his time in Korea. He has worked as an interpreter and translator for more than two decades, and his translation of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny was a finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. He divides his time between Seoul and the science fiction-y island of Songdo with his husband.
Inspired by a little-known piece of history—the underground group that kept an archive to ensure that the lives of Jewish occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II were not lost to history—this is a heart-wrenching novel of love and defiance that People calls "gripping, emotional, and against all odds, hopeful."
“This book is a masterpiece: profound, gripping, urgent, and beautiful.” —Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles
On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards to await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Would he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls?
Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. He learns about their childhoods and their daydreams, their passions and their fears, their desperate strategies for safety and survival. The stories form a portrait of endurance in a world where no choices are good ones.
One of the people Adam interviews is his flatmate Sala Wiskoff, who is stoic, determined, and funny—and married with two children. Over the months of their confinement, in the presence of her family, Adam and Sala fall in love. As they desperately carve out intimacy, their relationship feels both impossible and vital, their connection keeping them alive.
But when Adam discovers a possible escape from the Ghetto, he is faced with an unbearable choice: whom can he save, and at what cost ?
Inspired by the testimony-gathering project with the code name Oneg Shabbat, New York Times bestselling author Lauren Grodstein draws readers into the lives of people living on the edge. Told with immediacy and heart, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a piercing story of love, determination, and sacrifice.
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