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EXCERPTS FROM BUNNYPUSS T R A N S L AT E D B Y G I U L I A D O S S I A N D A B I G A I L W E I L
Everything that can be expressed with inappropriate words can also be expressed with appropriate ones. But shittily.
I want to be a better person.
I want to be an astronaut.
You're broke.
You're broke.
I want to be myself.
I want to believe in the future.
You're broke.
You're broke.
I want to hang myself. ...And you're out of toilet paper.
You warm the cockles of my heart.
That's a one-way ticket to a heart attack.
Excerpts from Bunnypuss
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Do you ever feel like you're just a figment of someone else's imagination?
That at any moment you could be erased from the face of the earth ...
You're losing me! You're losing me!
Yes! Yes! And that all of your hard work comes to nothing!
Or on the contrary, that the world around you is your invention ...
Or that somebody is crying out for help, but you can't hear them ...
PRAISE FOR FOUND LIFE “Linor Goralik is a Renaissance woman of our own day, writing (and drawing!) in a wide range of genres, all with sharp intelligence. Her writing is fresh and thought-provoking, with both profound insight and deadpan humor. The numerous translators allow exploration of different aspects of Goralik’s voice, so that this selection of work offers the reader a wonderful variety and versatility. A beautiful and important book!”— S I B E L AN FO R R E S TE R, Swarthmore College “Linor Goralik has a perfect ear for the wander and wonder of ordinary speech, for the way the weirdness of human language conveys the weirdness of human experience. In turn hilarious and heart-rending, her fictions and poems bristle with epiphanies, with jolts of comprehension and, just as commonly, of vertiginous incomprehension. A literary descendant of Daniil Kharms, the conceptualists, and Chekhov, this transnational writer-ventriloquist describes a world of multiple realities, including that of the supernatural, but she is also painstakingly precise in her depictions of male and female behavior in post-Soviet space. The editors and translators are to be praised for, among many other things, finding the idiomatic and colloquial American English to convincingly express the alive Russian of the original.”— E U G E NE O S TAS HE VS KY, author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi Columbia University Press New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN: 978-0-231-18350-5