"This utterly brilliant and absolutely delightful novel by Japanese-born Yoko Tawada, written in German, is by far the freshest take I've read on both foreignness and writing in I don't even know how long--possibly ever." -- Jennifer Croft - Best Translated Book Awards "But like those of Bridegroom, the animal characters of Memoirs pursue a hybrid existence, refusing to romanticize the state of nature." -- Christine Smallwood - Harper's Magazine "A writer of scrupulous intensity." -- Kirkus Reviews "Memoirs gives us an often funny and intimate perspective on what it must be like to be a sentient bear in an overwhelmingly human world." -- Clio Chang - New Republic "In 'Memoirs,' when a polar bear walks into a bookstore or a grocery store, there are no troubles stemming from a lack of opposable thumbs. As with Kafka's animal characters, we are freed to dislike them in the special way we usually reserve only for ourselves." -- Rivka Galchen - New York Times Magazine "A distinguished contribution to the unique paranoid style of the new European novel." -- Anis Shivani - The Brooklyn Rail "Her finest stories dramatize the fate of the individual in a mobilized world." -- Benjamin Lytal - The New York Sun "Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within." -- The New York Times "Tawada's accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency." -- The New York Times Book Review "As acrobatic with her writing as her polar bear subjects, Yoko Tawada walks a line between fantastical yet believable." -- World Literature Today "In chronicling the lives of three generations of uniquely talented polar bears, the fantastically gifted Yoko Tawada has created an unforgettable meditation on celebrity, art, incarceration, and the nature of consciousness. Tawada is, far and away, one of my favorite writers working today-thrilling, discomfiting, uncannily beautiful, like no one you have ever read before. Memoirs of a Polar Bear is Tawada at her best: humanity, as seen through the eyes of these bears, has never looked quite so stirringly strange." -- Laura van den Berg

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then moved again to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal. The translator of Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser, among others, Susan Bernofsky is currently working on a biography of Walser.