Manuela Draeger is one of French author Antoine Volodine’s
numerous heteronyms and she therefore belongs to a community of
imaginary authors that includes Lutz Bassmann and Elli Kronauer.
Since 2002, she has published novels for adolescents.
Brian Evenson is the author of more than a dozen books
of fiction. His novel Last Days won the American Library
Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His
novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a
finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild
Award. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean
Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine,
Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry
Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated
into French, Italian, Greek Japanese, Persian, Russia, Spanish,
Slovenian, and Turkish. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the
Critical Studies Program at CalArts.
Valerie Evenson is a scholar and translator.
“With the calm strangeness of dreams, and humor deepened by a hint
of melancholy, these wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers
of the imagination. All musical dogs, woolly crabs, children and
other detectives of the not-yet-invented should own this book.”
—Shelley Jackson
“In three short stories with a distinct Murakami vibe, hapless
investigator Bobby Potemkine threads his way through his city’s
meteor-shredded ruins to find out which of several women named Lili
has really invented fire, what to do about an angry noodle named
Auguste Diodon, and how to rescue the many baby pelicans that
litter the roads. Every page introduces another curiosity in
Draeger’s cabinet of wonders.” —Publishers Weekly
“The stories are dreamlike, cozy, and creepy and wistful all at
once. They remind me of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll stories, if the
Moomin adventures unrolled against a backdrop of subtle bleakness.
Everything’s happy, yet you feel like everything is destroyed. They
also remind me of Chagall’s paintings, if the paintings were
hanging in a bomb shelter.” —Sofia Samatar
“Draeger is a French author of adolescent fiction, but she’s also a
fictional character created by Antoine Volodine, which is a pen
name of an anonymous French writer. In Volodine’s stories, Draeger
is a containment-camp librarian who writes stories for children,
but in France she’s published without that backstory. Thank god for
The Dorothy Project, who published three of her stories in the US
in a delirious, playful Brian Evenson translation called In the
Time of the Blue Ball.” —Tin House
“If you’ve ever read anything like Manuela Draeger’s In the Time of
the Blue Ball, it must’ve been at least five green balls ago,
because this book is strange and unlike other books.” —The Review
of Contemporary Fiction
“As with Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss before her, Manuela Draeger
materializes new phrases and places from nothing and inside of
fresh and vastly imaginative stories.” —J.A. Tyler, Pank
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