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House of Day, House of Night (Polish)
by Olga Tokarczuk; Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Translator
A novel about the rich stories of small places. A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There's the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There's the man whose death--with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech--was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history, but a cosmology.
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The Ballad of the Last Guest (German)
by Peter Handke; Krishna Winston, Translator
Gregor returns home from another continent. The landscape, formerly dotted with small villages, has been absorbed into the outskirts of a large city, both familiar and foreign at the same time. His father sits playing cards, waiting for him, but Gregor is surprised to find his sister holding an infant. He, the older brother, is to be the child's godfather--though he also carries with him the secret of his younger brother's death. In the end, Gregor is never quite able to stay put. He is drawn out into the world, into the streets and alleys of what is now a city, to the cinema, the soccer stadium, the forest, and above all the old fruit orchard, now overgrown and beyond saving. As he walks, the present and the past become intertwined--memories of childhood surface, and inner voices enter into dialogue.
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Wolf Hour (Norwegian)
by Jo Nesbo; Robert Ferguson, Translator
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2016. When a small-time criminal and gun dealer is shot down in the street, all signs point to Tomas Gomez, a quiet man with a mysterious past-and deep connections to a notorious gang-who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Other murders soon follow, and it appears Gomez is only getting started. Meanwhile, Bob Oz, a down-and-out suspended police officer with a dubious past of his own, becomes fascinated by the case: he is obsessed with the notion of hunting down a serial killer who only he can understand, a killer with a story as tragic as his own. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2022. An enigmatic Norwegian man with ties to Minneapolis - a self-described crime writer - has traveled to the United States to research the Gomez case, in the hopes of writing a book about it. But as his investigation progresses, the writer's seemingly neutral position reveals itself to be more complicated than the reader is initially led to believe.
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The Idiot (Russian)
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; David McDuff, Translator
Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naïve epileptic Prince Myshkin-- known as the "idiot"--pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of "a truly beautiful soul" and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world.
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The Jaguar's Roar (Portuguese)
by Micheliny Verunschk; Juliana Barbassa, Translaor
The story of an Indigenous girl's kidnapping during a colonial expedition intertwines with a young woman's modern-day search for identity and ancestral truths. In 1817, explorers Spix and Martius returned from their three-year voyage in Brazil with not only an extensive account of their journey, but also with an Indigenous boy and girl, Iñe-e and Juri. Kidnapped from rival tribes as part of the colonialist trend of collecting "living specimens" on scientific expeditions, the two tragically perished shortly after arriving in Europe. This lyrically rich novel takes their perspective to illuminate their harrowing journey. Micheliny Verunschk's fifth novel, the first to be translated into English, powerfully challenges dominant historical narratives by centering the voices of these stolen Indigenous children. Intertwining their story with a narrative set in contemporary Brazil, we meet Josefa, a young woman grappling with her own identity when she encounters Iñe-e's image in an exhibition. Through its poignant exploration of memory, colonialism, and belonging, this novel stands out in Brazilian literature, offering readers a profound reflection on the enduring impact of history on personal lives.
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I Give You My Silence (Spanish)
by Mario Vargas Llosa; Adrian Nathan West, Translator
In his final novel, the Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa returns to his native Peru.
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The Amberglow Candy Store (Japanese)
by Hiyoko Kurisu; Matt Treyvaud, Translator
A fox spirit sells magical confections to troubled humans, only for them to get a little more than they bargained for.
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We Computers: A Ghazal Novel (Uzbek)
by Hamid Ismailov; Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Translator
In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon-Perse finds himself in possession of one of the most promising inventions of the century: a computer. Enchanted by snippets of Persian poetry he learns from his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail, Jon-Perse builds a computer program capable of both analyzing and generating literature. But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds--of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love--in the stories and people he and AI conjure. Hamid Ismailov brings together his work as a poet, translator, and student of literature of both East and West to craft a postmodern ode to poetry across centuries and continents. Crossing the poètes maudits with beloved Sufi classics, blending absurdist dreams with the life of the famed Persian poet Hafez, moving from careful mathematical calculations to lyrical narratives, Ismailov invents an ingenious transnational poetics of love and longing for the digital age. Situated at the crossroads of a multilingual world and mediated by the unreliable sensibilities of digital intelligence, this book is a dazzling celebration of how poetry resonates across time and space.
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A Muzzle for Witches (Croatian)
by Dubravka Ugrešić; Ellen Elias-Bursać, Translator
As with the rest of her literary career, Dubravka Ugresic's final work, A Muzzle for Witches, is uncategorizable. On its surface, the book is a conversation with the literary critic Merima Omeragi , covering topics such as 'Women and the Male Perspective,' 'The Culture of (Self) Harm,' and 'The Melancholy of Vanishing.' But the book is more than a simple interview: It's a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil -- especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic's birth country--and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing. One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresic was one-of-a-kind, who novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.
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Solenoid (Romanian)
by Mircea Cartarescu; Sean Cotter, Translator
From Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of existence, history, philosophy, and mathematics. On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art. The novel is grounded in the reality of Communist Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s , including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining history with fiction- the scientists Nicola Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript-Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.
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Mercer County Library System
2751 Brunswick Pike Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648 609-882-9246
https://mcl.org
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