“The project of the book is to toy with language and meaning, with things that sound similar and even the same across languages but mean strange, funny, unusual, and odd things. This is the joy of cognates, as any language learner will tell you—the surprise they can bring to the familiar. By defamiliarizing these phrases, Bernofsky brilliantly constructs an unfamiliar reading experience in English.”

Read the rest of my review of False Friends by Uljana Wolf, translated by Susan Bernofsky (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) on The Iowa Review