The country road

"Admired by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and particularly Rainer Maria Rilke, Swiss author Regina Ullmann has never appeared before in English: her oracular, strange, singular voice astonishes. The stories in this volume are largely set in the Alpine countryside, and though resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of authors such as Adalbert Stifter, Ullmann's distinctive, otherworldly voice has inspired comparisons to her contemporary Robert Walser. In her stories, the archaic and the modern collide. In one tale, a young woman on an exhausting country walk recoils at a passing bicyclist, but accepts a ride from a wagon, taking her seat on a trunk with a snake coiled inside. As Ullmann writes, "sometimes the whole world appears to be painted on porcelain, right down to the dangerous cracks." This delicate but brittle beauty, with its ominous undertones, gives Regina Ullmann her unique voice" --