Read By: Monique Truong

<p><em>Monique Truong on her selection:</em></p> <p>On March 5, 2020, mere days before COVID-19 would change our day-to-day existence, I attended a crowded bookstore reading here in NYC, where Yoko Tawada and her friend Bettina Brandt read from Tawada's novel, <em>Memoirs of a Polar Bear</em>. They sat side-by-side, each wearing one white glove, and occasionally they held over their respective faces a hand-drawn polar bear mask, made for the occasion by Tawada. I couldn’t make up such delights. Here’s the <a href= "https://www.instagram.com/p/B9cbDGVh3aG/">photographic proof</a>. Now, when I revisit the off-kilter originality of Tawada’s novel, featuring not one but three polar bear narrators, it brings me right back to that reading, which seems to belong to another lifetime or to a parallel reality, which is apropos as the novel itself so deftly evokes the warp and weft of another way of existing, achingly familiar yet different and strange.</p> <p><a href= "https://bookshop.org/books/memoirs-of-a-polar-bear/9780811225786"><em> Memoirs of a Polar Bear</em></a> by Yoko Tawada</p> <p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0</span></p>