A coffee grinder, the soul of a man who drowned to death, a board game, a house, angels, God, mushrooms, and trees are all characters in Olga Tokarczuk’s third novel, Primeval and Other Times, first published in Polish in 1996 and forthcoming in a new edition, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, in December from Riverhead Books. The narrative chronicles the universe of a fictional village called Primeval through short vignettes of different characters, both human and nonhuman, over the course of three generations during the twentieth century. In “The Time of Misia’s Grinder,” Tokarczuk writes: “Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people.” Write a collection of vignettes about diverse characters that collaboratively reveal a microcosm of points of view in a specific time and place. What objects will give voice to the philosophical and existential questions you wish to explore?
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