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  • Orion Magazine

    When the Whales Leave

    Sep 03, 2020 3 minutes
    TRANSLATED BY ILONA YAZHBIN CHAVASSE

    YURI RYTKHEU

    Milkweed Editions, 2020. $14, 136 pages.

    A YOUNG WOMAN named Nau lives alone on the edge of an Arctic sea, where she falls in love with a whale. The whale, Reu, returns her adoration, and transforms into a man’s body to live with her. “What will we do?” Nau asks him. Reu tells her, “We will live a new kind of life. A human life.”

    On a rocky spit of land by the sea, Nau gives birth to whale babies; they must live in the

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