Ventriloquism Print

I took the idea of belly-speaking from the original meaning of ventriloquism (to speak from the belly), and decided that the front of the book should show a kind of marionette figure (operating her own strings) whose body was the gingerbread house itself.

From the belly of this character, from the stove of the gingerbread house/body, rises a smoke of characters from the world of these stories: Narwhals, bears, parrot-men, pickpocket pamphleteers, monks, dream-tapirs, witches, monopods, rusalki, selkies, blemmyae .... and a mystery of others.

In the sky above hang many strange planets, even a fob watch, and down below on a railway line from some eastern onion-domed city, travels a train whose track becomes a ladder to the moon.