"A celebration of both storytelling and translation, Elemental is essential; a gift that opens up the pleasures of new worlds." --Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities

A family's heirloom stones unearth a story spanning war, illness, and radioactivity. A pipeline installed to protect a town from flooding results in a howling that disturbs the town's inhabitants. A political prisoner embarks on an epic flight toward freedom, literally blown like a kite in the wind.

A whirlwind of fantastic new writing from Japan, Iran, Norway, Germany, Madagascar, Iraq, Poland, and Israel, this collection of fiction and reportage maps the intimate, ongoing relationship between human civilization and the natural world. Do we set the limits on our existence? Or is it wind, water, fire, and earth that define--even control--us? Borrowing from eco-literature and mythology, Elemental unflinchingly takes up the earth.