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Celebrate National Translation Month |
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Family lexicon
by Natalia Ginzburg
Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy's great writers, introduced A Family Lexicon, her most celebrated work, with an unusual disclaimer: "The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented." A Family Lexicon re-creates with extraordinary objectivity the small world of a family enduring some of the most difficult years of the twentieth century, the period from the rise of Mussolini through World War II (Ginzburg's first husband, who was a member of the resistance, was killed by the Nazis) and its immediate aftermath. Every family has its store of phrases and sayings by which it maintains its sense of what it means to be a family. Such sayings and stories lie at the heart of a great novel about family and history.
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The Copenhagen trilogy : Childhood; Youth; Dependency
by Tove Irma Margit Ditlevsen
Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.
Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up―in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.
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All the lovers in the night
by Mieko Kawakami
A freelance editor in Tokyo finds the strength to change her drab, lonely existence only to have episodes from her past drag her back into old habits, in the new novel from the best-selling author of Breasts and Eggs.
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Tomb of sand : a novel
by Gītāñjali Śrī
WINNER OF THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE!
A playful, feminist, and utterly original epic about a family-especially its inimitable octogenarian matriarch-in northern India. An eighty-year-old woman, Ma, slips into a deep depression after the death ofher husband. Despite her family's cajoling, she refuses to get up from bed. Her responsible eldest son, Bade, and dutiful, Reebok-sporting daughter-in-law, Bahu, flit around trying to attend to Ma's every need, while her favorite grandson, the cheerful and gregarious Sid, entertains her with his guitar. But it is only when Sid's younger brother-Serious Son, pathologically incapable of laughing-brings his grandmother a sparkling golden cane covered with butterflies that things begin to change. With a new lease on life thanks to the powers of the cane, Ma gets out of bed and embarks on a series of adventures that baffle even her unconventional feminist daughter, Beti. She ditches her cumbersome saris, develops a close friendship with a hijra, and finally sets off on a fateful journey that will turn the family's understanding of themselves upside down. Elegant, heartbreaking, and funny all at once, Tomb of Sand is a literary masterpiece. Rich with fantastical elements, folklore, and exuberant wordplay, and encompassing such topics as Buddhism, global warming, feminism, Partition, and the gender binary, it marks the none-too-soon American debut of an extraordinary writer. Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
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The birds
by Tarjei Vesaas
Mattis is a man who has a deep connection to the natural world, but is unable to earn a living and is supported by his sister, but when his sister takes a lover, Mattis' world threatens to fall apart.
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Frankenstein in Baghdad : a novel
by Amad Sa'dw
Hadi, an eccentric scavenger in U.S.-occupied Baghdad, collects human body parts and cobbles them together into a single corpse, but discovers his creation is missing just as a series of strange murders begins to plague the city.
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Salka Valka
by Halldór Laxness
On a winter night, an eleven-year-old Salvör and her unmarried mother Sigurlína disembark at the remote, run-down fishing village of Óseyri, where life is "lived in fish and consists of fish." The two struggle to make their way amidst the rough, salt-worn men of the town. After Sigurlína's untimely death, Salvör pays for her funeral and walks home alone, precipitating her coming of age as a daring, strong-willed young woman who chops off her hair, earns her own wages, educates herself through political and philosophical texts, and soon becomes an advocate for the town's working class, organizing a local chapter of the seamen's union. A feminist coming-of-age tale, an elegy to the plight of the working class and the corrosive effects of social and economic inequality, and a poetic window into the arrival of modernity in a tiny industrial town, Salka Valka is a novel of epic proportions, living and breathing with its vibrant cast of characters, filled with tenderness, humor, and remarkable pathos.
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Love in a fallen city
by Ailing Zhang
Collects six tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.
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Embers
by Sándor Márai
In an evocative novel originally published in Europe 1942, an elderly aristocrat and a friend he has not seen in more than forty years engage in a duel of words, stories, accusations, and evasions that encompass their entire lives and that of a third person, the late chatelaine of the castle. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
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Chess Story
by Stefan Zweig
Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.
This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.
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Weeping waters
by Karin Brynard
Working at a post on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, traumatized cop Inspector Albertus Beeslaar, after an artist and her 4-year-old adopted daughter are murdered on a local farm, is plunged into the intrigue and racial tensions of the community and soon discovers that violence knows no geographical or ethnic boundaries. Original.
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Three
by Valérie Perrin
In 2017, when a car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside, Virginie, a local journalist with a dark past, focuses on three friends who were unusually close when young but now no longer speak, bringing her to a surprising truth that frays relationships while others are formed.
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Moldy strawberries / : Stories
by Caio Fernando Abreu
In eighteen exhilarating stories, Caio Fernando Abreu navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the 80s. Tenderly suspended between fear and longing, Abreu's characters grasp for connection. A man speckledwith Carnival glitter crosses a crowded dance floor and seeks the warmth and beauty of another body. A budding office friendship between two young men turns into a surprising love, "a strange and secret harmony." One man desires another but fears a clumsy word or gesture might tear their complot to pieces. After so many precarious offerings - a salvaged cigarette, a knock on the door from within the downpour of a dream, or a tight-lipped smile - Abreu's schemes explode and implode. Junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, and conflicted artists face threats at every turn. But, inwardly ferocious and secretly resilient, they heal. For Caio Fernando Abreu there is beauty on the horizon, mingled with luminous memory and decay.
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Friend : a novel from North Korea
by Nam-nyong Paek
A tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists' past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It chronicles the toll their acrimony takes on their son and their careers alongside the story of the judge's own marital troubles. A best-seller in North Korea, where Paek continues to live and write, Friend illuminates a side of life in the DPRK that Western readers have never before encountered. Far from being a propagandistic screed inpraise of the Great Leader, Friend describes the lives of people who struggle with everyday problems such as marital woes and workplace conflicts. Instead of socialist-realist stock figures, Paek depicts complex characters who wrestle with universal questions of individual identity, the split between public and private selves, the unpredictability of existence, and the never-ending labor of maintaining a relationship. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Korea's most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.
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Love in the big city : a novel
by Sang Young Park
When his female best friend and roommate, Jaehee, leaves him to settle down, Young, a cynical gay man living in the lonely city of Seoul, tries to make sense of his life and his relationships as he finds himself torn between two very different men.
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Jawbone
by Mónica Ojeda
Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise? When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality. Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous "creepypastas," Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.
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The Moscoviad
by Yuri Andrukhovych
The literary dormitory at Moscow University becomes a kind of Russian Grand Hotel, serving the last supper of empire to a host of writers gathered from every corner of the continent, and beyond. Young poets from Vietnam, Mongolia, Yakutia, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Ukraine assemble to study, drink, frolic, and explore each other and the decaying city around them. When the supper turns into a bacchanal, who's surprised? "The empire betrayed its drunks. And thus doomed itself to disintegration." Part howl, part literary slapstick, part joyful dirge, charged with the brashness of youth, betraying the vision of the permanent outsider, Andrukhovych's novel suggests that literature really is news that stays news. Funny, buoyant, flamboyant, ground-breaking, and as revelatory today as when it was first published in Ukrainian, The Moscoviad remains a literary milestone. In spirit and intellectual brio Andrukhovych, whose irreverence makes Borat seem pious, is kin to the great Halldor Laxness and the venerable David Foster Wallace. --Askold Melnyczuk.
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The sorrow of war : a novel of North Vietnam
by Bo Ninh
The Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a North Vietnamese infantryman. In a series of flashbacks, as he buries the dead following a battle, the narrator recounts his 10 years of service, the comrades he lost and the way the war ruined the love of his life. The author is a veteran of the NVA's Glorious 27th Youth Brigade, a 500-man unit from which only 10 men survived. He lives in Hanoi.
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The resting place
by Camilla Sten
Inheriting a house tucked away in the Swedish woodsa place of secretsfrom her cruel grandmother, Eleanor, seeking the truth about her grandmothers murder and the killer, soon regrets disturbing what rests in this place with a dark past. 150,000 first printing.
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Dead souls
by Nikolaĭ Vasil'evich Gogol'
Chichikov, an amusing and often confused schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from landholders' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit.
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When I sing, mountains dance : a novel
by Irene Solà
A spellbinding novel that places one family's tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself. Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to "reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain." He gathers black chanterelles and attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he'd harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst. When I Sing, Mountains Dance, winner of the European Union Prize, is a giddy paean to the land in all its interconnectedness, and in it Irene Solà finds a distinct voice for each extraordinary consciousness: the lightning bolts, roe-deer, mountains, the ghosts of the civil war, the widow Sió and later her grown children, Hilari and Mia, as well as Mia's lovers with their long-buried secrets and their hidden pain. Solà animates the polyphonic world around us, the fierce music of the seasons, as well as the stories we tell to comprehend loss and love on a personal, historical, and even geological scale. Lyrical, elemental, and mythic, hers is a fearlessly imaginative new voice that brilliantly renders both our tragedies and our triumphs.
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Seasons of purgatory
by Shahriyār Mandanī§pūr
Short stories translated from the Persian.
In Seasons of Purgatory , the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.
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Disquiet : a novel
by Zülfü Livaneli
From the internationally bestselling author of Serenade for Nadia, a powerful story of love and faith amidst the atrocities committed by ISIS against the Yazidi people. Disquiet transports the reader to the contemporary Middle East through the stories of Meleknaz, a Yazidi Syrian refugee, and Hussein, a young man from the Turkish city of Mardin near the Syrian border. Passionate about helping others, Hussein begins visiting a refugee camp to tend to the thousands of poor and sick streaming into Turkey, fleeing ISIS. There, he falls in love with Meleknaz-whom his disapproving family will call "the devil" who seduced him-and their relationship sets further tragedy in motion. A nuanced meditation on the nature of being human and an empathetic, probing lookat the past and present of these Mesopotamian lands, Disquiet gives voice to the peoples, faiths, histories, and stories that have swept through this region over centuries.
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The liar
by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Desperate to escape a near-invisible life, an ice cream shop worker tells a terrible lie that renders her the center of public and media attention, before she is blackmailed by a neighbor who knows the truth. 30,000 first printing.
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Zorba the Greek : the saint's life of Zorba
by Nikos Kazantzakis
Presents a new translation of the novel in which a modern hero whose capacity to live each moment to its fullest is revealed in a series of adventures in Crete.
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The bridge on the Drina
by Ivo Andrić
A hardcover edition of Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andric's historical novel about the Balkans, first published in 1945, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Lovett F. Edwards, with a new introduction by Misha Glenny, a bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
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Eeg
by Daša Drndic
In this breathtaking final work, Daša Drndic reaches new heights. Andreas Ban's suicide attempt has failed. Though very ill, he still finds the will to tap on the glass of history to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, he dissects society and his environment, shunning all favors as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of our times. History remembers the names of the perpetrators, not the victims--Ban remembers and honors the lost. He travels from Rijeka to Zagreb, from Belgrade to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian castles. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the CIA and died peacefully in their beds. Ban's family is with him too, those already dead and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban--and Daša Drndic--play a stunning last match against Death.
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The dog of Tithwal : short stories
by Sa'ādat Hasan Manòto
Widely considered a reigning master of the modern short story, Manto vividly conjures life on the streets of Bombay - its prostitutes, pimps, gangsters, artists, writers, and those caught in the fore of the India-Pakistan partition. Deeply opposed to partition, Manto is best known for his portrayals of its violence and absurdities. From an ownerless dog caught in the firing squad at the border of the two countries, to neighbors turned enemy soldiers pausing for tea together in a short cease fire - Mantochallenges the edges of geographic, cultural, and social boundaries with an unflinching and satirical gaze, and a powerful humanism. With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri, this collection illuminates Manto's most vital and universal work, and - half a century later - remains a prescient text illuminating so many of the glaring and silenced conflicts that plague humanity today.
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The dinner : a novel
by Herman Koch
Meeting at a fashionable Amsterdam restaurant for dinner, two couples move from small talk to the wrenching shared challenge of their teenage sons' shattering act of violence that has triggered a police investigation and revealed the extent to which each family will go to protect those they love, in a U.S. release of an international best-seller. Reprint. Movie tie-in.
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The Rabbit Back Literature Society
by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
Selected as the new, 10th member of an exclusive and elite writer's club headed by a renowned children's author, Ella discovers the other participants are involved in disturbing secrets, mysterious rituals and have books in which the words begin to rearrange themselves. Simultaneous.
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Harlequin's millions : a fairy tale
by Bohumil Hrabal
"By the writer whom Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's greatest contemporary writer comes a novel (now in English for the first time) peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and sprinkled with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, this novel allows us into the mind of an elderly woman coming to terms with the passing of time.
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The shadow of the wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author's works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.
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Wizard of the crow
by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong®o
Draws on traditional African storytelling traditions to present a comic tale of the Free Republic of Aburiria, where a battle for control of black souls is fought by His High Mighty Excellency, an eponymous Wizard, a corrupt Christian Ministry, and the nefarious Global Bank. Reprint.
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A kitchen in the corner of the house
by Ambai
"In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body."--Amazon.com
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