Honey, I Killed the Cats

Dorota Masłowska is a Polish writer, playwright, and journalist. She is the recipient of the prestigious Polityka Prize for her debut novel Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną (Snow White and Russian Red, Grove Atlantic), published when she was just 19 years old. The book garnered massive critical acclaim in Poland, has been translated into dozens of languages, and was made into a movie directed by Xawery Żuławski. Since then, she has written several novels and plays and has become a celebrated literary figure in Poland. Honey, I Killed the Cats, her second novel to be published in English, has been adapted for stage and portions were made into a short film directed by Marcin Nowak. She currently resides Warsaw.Benjamin Paloff received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University in 2007. He is the author of Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe) (Northwestern University Press, 2016), which in 2015 received the American Comparative Literature Association's Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize. He has also published two collections of poems, And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. A former poetry editor at Boston Review, his poems have appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere, and he has translated several books from Polish and Czech, including works by Richard Weiner, Dorota Maslowska, Marek Bienczyk, and Andrzej Sosnowski. He has twice received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts—in poetry as well as translation—and has been a fellow of the US Fulbright Programs, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Michigan Society of Fellows. He is currently a professor at the University of Michigan.

"Masłowska here describes a terrifying funhouse abounding with toxic friendships, ominous takes on consumerism, and grotesque moments of violence and general discomfort...The tone is broadly satirical throughout, but it’s the variety with fangs — sometimes literally." — Tobias Carroll, Mystery Tribune"Dorota Masłowska is a mistress of the startling metaphor and her heroine is certainly not the stuff of chick lit.  She appears in dreams (her own and those of her friends and neighbours) pyjama bottoms dripping with blood – yes honey, she has killed the cats. And she hardly need a hero to come and save her from drowning, does she? If this gloriously strange book sounds like your sort of thing, give Benjamin Paloff’s translation a go..." — Kate Sotejeff-Wilson"Dorota Masłowska’s Honey, I Killed the Cats doesn’t read like a novel, but rather a sequence of tabs on an internet browser, each one a minor digression into a deeper chaos. Written in 2012 by one of Poland’s leading young authors, Benjamin Paloff’s lively translation is distinctly 2019, as if constructed solely from a digital-era dictionary." — Matt Janney, The Calvert Journal "Paloff is able to preserve Maslowska’s energy and surprising wordplay in this translation, and the prose brings life to the setting in a way that energizes the story..."— Ambrose Mary Gallagher, Michigan Quarterly Review "Masłowska's latest is a sucrose-loaded simulacrum for the American monoculture, recklessly scrambling barbed sarcasm with irreverent sight gags to stupendous effect. A knives-out dissection of aesthetic vulgarity that refuses to be calmed, corralled, or otherwise contained. Honey, I Killed the Cats is delightfully demented fun." — Justin Walls, Powell's Books at Cedar Hill Crossing"A wild, technicolor send up of culture and consumerism." — Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books"A grossly all-too-accurate satire of American consumer culture and those frantically swiping their plastic (in hopes of some kind of meaning) inside of it. Hilarious and biting. A scream." — Traci Thiebaud, Brazos Bookstore"Slim and ferocious, Masłowska’s novel is a wild trip from beginning to end." — Publisher's Weekly"So absurdly extended—and so deranged in its detail—that it’s genuinely funny." — Kirkus Reviews "She is the hope of Polish literature.” — Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung“Paloff deserves to be commended. His translation is as transparent as possible, literal without being wooden, lively yet not artificially so. Maslowska’s linguistic vigor communicates itself to English-language readers so readily that we are caught up in the quick current of her prose before we even know what the book is about.” — Reading in Translation, Magdalena Kay