Women in Translation

Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

Asa's husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family's home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time. One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole - a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.--Provided by publisher.

Publication Date: 2012 / 2016

Summary:

"I believe there is a miracle in Wanda," wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. "Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated." It is perhaps this "miracle"--the seeming collapse of fiction and fact--that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.

Publication Date: 1955 / 1958

Summary:

In Wild, Cheryl Strayed writes of The Ten Thousand Things: "Each of Dermoût's sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love." And it's true, The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness -- and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch -- or European -- literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

Publication Date: 2005

Summary:

Consisting of sixty short stories by forty women writers from across the Arab world, this collection opens numerous windows onto Arab culture and society and offers keen insights into what Arab women feel and think. The stories deal not only with feminist issues but also with topics of a social, cultural, and political nature. Different styles and modes of writing are represented, along with a diversity of techniques and creative approaches, and the authors present many points of view and various ways of solving problems and confronting situations in everyday life. Lively, outspoken, and provocative, these stories are essential reading for anyone interested in the Arab world.

Publication Date: 2017

Summary:

Liborio has to leave Mexico, a land that has taught him little more than a keen instinct for survival. He crosses the Rio Bravo, like so many others, to reach "the promised land." And in a barrio like any other, in some gringo city, this illegal immigrant tells his story. As Liborio narrates his memories we discover a childhood scarred by malnutrition and abandonment, an adolescence lived with a sense of having nothing to lose. In his new home, he finds a job at a bookstore. He falls in love with a woman so intensely that his fantasies of her verge on obsession. And, finally, he finds himself on a path that just might save him: he becomes a boxer. Liborio's story is constructed in a dazzling language that reflects the particular culture of border towns and expresses both resistance and fascination. This is a migrants' story of deracination, loneliness, fear, and finally, love told in a sparkling, innovative prose. It's Million Dollar Baby meets The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and a story of migration and hope that is as topical as it is timeless.

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don't know what to do with themselves-- and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives--and hers--and ours.

Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse-by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals-propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Like Roberto Bolaño's 2666 or Faulkner's greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence-real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it's a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it--

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

In Beatriz Bracher's Antonio--her third novel and her breakout book in Brazil--Benjamin, on the verge of becoming a father, discovers a tragic family secret involving patrimony and determines to find out how it happened. Those most immediately involved are all dead, but their three closest confidantes are still alive--his grandmother, Isabel; Haroldo, his grandfather's friend; and Raul, his father's friend--and each will tell him different versions of the facts. It is by collecting these shards of memories that Benjamin will piece together the painful puzzle of his family history. As with a Faulkner novel, putting together these three perspectives leads to contradictions as often as to the truth--

Publication Date: c. 1021 / 1976

Summary:

This classical novel of court life in tenth and eleventh-century Japan centers on the life and loves of a nobleman known as the shining Genji, son of an emperor, and those of Kaoru, grandson of Genji's best friend. In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote the world's first novel. But The Tale of Genji is no mere artifact. It is, rather, a lively and astonishingly nuanced portrait of a refined society where every dalliance is an act of political consequence, a play of characters whose inner lives are as rich and changeable as those imagined by Proust. Chief of these is "the shining Genji," the son of the emperor and a man whose passionate impulses create great turmoil in his world and very nearly destroy him.

Publication Date: 1986 / 2000

Summary:

This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons, ' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

On a flight from Berlin to Paris, a woman haunted by composer Arnold Schoenberg's self-portrait reflects on her romantic encounter with a pianist. Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst, Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection.

Publication Date: 2015

Summary:

The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship with Hungary's Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda's housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda's household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda. They share a kind of love--at least until Magda's long-sought success as a writer leads to a devastating revelation. Len Rix's prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer--

Publication Date: 1939 / 2022

Summary:

Fear and Other Stories is a translation from Yiddish to English of the collected stories of Chana Blankshteyn (1860?-1939), a woman who may be almost entirely forgotten now but was widely admired during her long and productive life. The mere existence of these stories is itself a remarkable feat as the collection was published in July 1939, just before the Nazis invaded Poland and two weeks before Blankshteyn's death. Anita Norich's introduction argues that this is not a work of Holocaust literature (there are no death camps, partisans or survivors of WWII), but anti-Semitism is palpable, as is the threat of war and its aftermath. What could it have felt like to live under these conditions? How might a woman who was a feminist, a Jew, and an activist understand the recent past of war and revolution through which she had lived and also confront the horror that was beginning to unfold? The nine stories in this volume take place primarily in Vilna, as well as various parts of Europe. As if presaging what was to come, World War I and Russian civil wars are the backdrops to these stories, as Jews and non-Jews find themselves under German occupation or caught up in the revolutionary fervor that promised them much and took away almost everything. The young women in Blankshteyn's stories insist on their independence, on equality with their lovers, and on meaningful work. Like the men in the stories, they study, work, and yearn for love. The situations in which these characters find themselves may be unfamiliar to a contemporary reader, but their reactions to the turmoil, the frighteningly changing times, and the desire for love and self-expression are deeply resonant with today's audience. The history may be specific, but the emotions are universal. Blankshteyn's stories are both a view of the final gasp of Eastern European Jewish culture and a compelling modern perspective on the broader world. Students and scholars of history and culture, women's literature, and translation studies will wonder how they've gone this long without reading Blankshteyn's work.

Publication Date: 2019 / 2020

Summary:

Tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old unmarried narrator, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko's daughter Midoriko. Unable to come to terms with her changed body after giving birth, Makiko becomes obsessed with the prospect of getting breast enhancement surgery. Meanwhile, her twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko is paralyzed by the fear of her oncoming puberty and finds herself unable to voice the vague, yet overwhelming anxieties associated with growing up. The narrator, who remains unnamed for most of the story, struggles with her own indeterminable identity of being neither a "daughter" nor a "mother." Set over three stiflingly hot days in Tokyo, the book tells of a reunion of sorts between two sisters, and the passage into womanhood of young Midoriko.

Publication Date: 1968 / 1990

Summary:

While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.

Publication Date: 1971 / 2019

Summary:

The legendary novel that is 'equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett' (New York Times Book Review). Malina invites the reader on a linguistic journey, into a world that stretches the very limits of language with Wittgensteinian zeal and Joycean inventiveness, where Ingeborg Bachmann ventriloquizes, and in the process demolishes Proust, Musil, and Balzac, and yet filters everything through her own utterly singular idiom. Malina is, quite simply, unlike anything else; it's a masterpiece. In Malina, Bachmann uses the intertwined lives of three characters to explore the roots of society's breakdown that lead to fascism, and in Bachmann's own words, 'it doesn't start with the first bombs that are dropped; it doesn't start with the terror that can be written about in every newspaper. It starts with relationships between people. Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I attempted to say that here in this society there is always war. There isn't war and peace, there's only war.'

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens, and to protect them from the dangers of the outside world. The young ladies are expected to learn, eat, and live together, presided over by the colonial white nuns. It is fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and a quota permits only two Tutsi students for every twenty pupils. As Gloriosa, the school's Hutu queen bee, tries on her parents' preconceptions and prejudices, Veronica and Virginia, both Tutsis, are determined to find a place for themselves and their history. In the struggle for power and acceptance, the lycée is transformed into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. During the interminable rainy season, everything slowly unfolds behind the school's closed doors: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution. Our Lady of the Nile is a landmark novel about a country divided and a society hurtling towards horror. In gorgeous and devastating prose, Mukasonga captures the dreams, ambitions and prejudices of young women growing up as their country falls apart.--Publisher's website.

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

Writers, publishers, readers and scholars have stopped apologising for the short story: the genre is no longer a bad investment, a trial-exercise for a novel or a minor entertainment, as demonstrated by exceptional writers with an almost exclusive dedication to it, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, Quim Monzó or Cristina Fernández Cubas. With deep roots in classic and medieval literatures, and great achievements in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, the genre of the short story, which benefits from the linguistic tightness of poetry and the narrative comforts of the novel, has finally been recognised as having a (hybrid) identity of its own. This volume re-edits and expands a previous bilingual collection published in 1997. The first edition included stories by twelve writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Adelaida García Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero, Maruja Torres, Soledad Puértolas and María Eugenia Salaverri. The present edition adds another four: Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marsé. The stories gathered in this second edition were written between 1980 and 2010, and testify to the richness and vitality of women's writing in contemporary Spain. With the original texts in Spanish as well as facing-page English translations, an Introduction, notes, and bio-bibliographical information on each author, this volume is a useful tool for students of the Spanish language and culture at all levels. It includes a selection of secondary reading on Spanish women writers and a selection of anthologies of Spanish short stories since 1997.

Publication Date: 1994 / 2019

Summary:

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses--until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

Publication Date: 2018 / 2020

Summary:

Each disparate object described in this book--a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific--shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, and Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and that, taken as a whole, open mesmerizing new vistas of how to think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.

Publication Date: 2007 / 2018

Summary:

A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.

Publication Date: 2023

Summary:

In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant. “I am woman and I celebrate every vein,” she writes, “where I guard my ancestors’ secrets / every Zoque man’s word in my mouth / every Zoque woman’s wisdom in my spit.” How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love. Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.

Publication Date: 1970

Summary:

Hope Against Hope was first published in English in 1970. It is Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of her life with Osip, who was first arrested in 1934 and died in Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-38. Hope Against Hope is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin's Soviet Union and one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. But it is also a profound inspiration - a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances.

Publication Date: 2023

Summary:

The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin's special military operation against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future. With power and clarity, the War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets documents the long beginning of the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine; what it feels like to interact with the strangers who suddenly become your countrymen; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day; the new danger of a routine coffee run. First published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and released each day on the site ISOLARII (and on Artforum), the War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide: it was translated by an anonymous collective of writers on Weibo; read live by Margaret Atwood on International Women's Day; adapted for an episode of This American Life on NPR; and brought to the 2022 Venice Biennale by President Zelensky as part of the pavilion This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.--

Publication Date: 2002 / 2023

Summary:

The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens. With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante, and Kobo Abe, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and critic Mieko Kanai-whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan-is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.

Publication Date: 2022

Summary:

Following one woman's journey from a troubled girlhood in working-class Copenhagen through her struggle to live on her own terms, Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy is a searingly honest, utterly immersive portrayal of love, friendship, art, ambition, and the terrible lure of addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers. --

Publication Date: c. 1960 / 2021

Summary:

"Sonomin Udval (1921– 1991) was born in Töv province. She studied at the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow and subsequently at the Soviet Communist Party University. She wrote poetry, plays, and fiction, and is especially famous for her novella Odgerel (1957) and for her many short stories. From 1961 until 1974, she was director of the Writers’ Union, in which capacity she oversaw the rehabilitation of many writers executed under false charges during the Great Repression. Udval’s style is almost cinematic, and in many of her stories lines of dialogue predominate, seeming more like a film script. The style of 'He Came with a Spare Horse,' however, is more descriptive, albeit told in the first person by the principal character. It takes place at the lunar New Year, a time at which wishes are made for the future and old friendships are recalled. Udval’s humor is seen in the interaction of Dogisüren with his friends, as well as in the clash between past and present, in the sign written in the traditional Mongolian script, barely remembered almost two decades after its replacement by Cyrillic, and in the new style of denim jeans."--Description from p. 273

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

A woman moves to a London suburb near the River Lea, without knowing quite why or for how long. Over a series of long, solitary walks she reminisces about the rivers she has encountered during her life. --

Publication Date: 2014 / 2016

Summary:

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a novel that stars three generations of talented writers and performers who happen to be polar bears. The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in The New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous, both as circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In Chapter One, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In Chapter Two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son--the last of their line--is Knut, born in Chapter Three in a Leipzig zoo, but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away ... Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen."

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

In this witty "how-to" guide, Wisława Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: "I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories," she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave-anonymously-for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life. She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. "I sigh to be a poet," Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. "I groan to be an editor," Szymborska responds. Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry's "prosaic side": "Let's take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?" This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike.

Publication Date: 2016

Summary:

Early in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-Revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and '30s, she wrote some of her finest stories while in exile in Paris, recalling her unforgettable encounters with Rasputin and her hopeful visit at age thirteen to Tolstoy after reading War and peace. In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing....

Publication Date: 1972 / 2008

Summary:

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life. Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.

Publication Date: 2019

Summary:

A haunting and powerful portrait of a young French girl, and her desire to escape the world in which she is born, without losing her identity. In the marshy, misty countryside of southwestern France, fourteen-year-old Galla rides her battered bicycle from the private Catholic high school she attends on scholarship to the rocky, barren farm where her family lives. It's a journey she makes every two weeks, forty miles round trip, traveling between opposite poles of ambition and guilt, school and home. Galla's loving, overwhelmed, incompetent mother doesn't want her to go to school; she wants her to stay at home, where Galla can look after her neglected little sisters, defuse her father's brutal rages, and help with the chores. What does this dutiful daughter owe her family, and what does she owe herself? In Inès Cagnati's haunting, emotionally and visually powerful novel Free Day, which won France's Prix Roger Nimier in 1973, Galla makes an extra journey on a frigid winter Saturday to surprise her mother. As she anticipates their reunion, stopping often to pry caked, gelid mud off her bicycle wheels, she mentally retraces the crooked path of her family's past and the more recent map of her school life as a poor but proud student. Galla's rich, dense interior monologue blends with the landscape around her, building a powerful portrait of a girl who yearns to liberate herself from the circumstances that confine her, without losing their ties to her heart--

Publication Date: 1980 / 2022

Summary:

Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko's first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn, learning how to accommodate him. At first Takiko seeks refuge in the company of other women, in the maternity hospital, in her son's nursery, but as he grows, her life becomes less circumscribed, expanding outward into previously unknown neighborhoods in her city and then beyond, into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and feeling for a wilder freedom. First published in Japan in 1980, Woman Running in the Mountains is as urgent and necessary an account today of the experience of the female body and of a woman's right to self-determination.

Publication Date: 2003

Summary:

Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn't one to complain. He's got a job--transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe--and though he doesn't enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he's not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he's happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he's managed--at least so far--to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

Six strangers. Six letters. A chain of dark confessions, none of which reaches the intended recipient. Over the course of one hundred profound and disturbing pages, The Night Post tells the story of characters living on the periphery, battling with devastating poverty, fighting their own demons. Set in an unnamed country torn apart by war, the six characters at the heart of this tale are compelled to share their most personal secrets. This outstanding novella addresses some of the defining issues of our age: migration, conflict and exploitation. From one of today's most talented Arabic writers, The Night Post forces the reader to ask whether, in an oppressively connected world, we are drifting ever further apart.

Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millennia-old tradition of Japanese folktales-shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells-and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them. A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women-who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive "feminine" passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

The daughter of Haitian journalist and pro-democracy activist Jean Léopold Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000, Jan J. Dominique offers a memoir that provides a uniquely personal perspective on the tumultuous end of the twentieth century in Haiti. Wandering Memory is her elegy for a father and an ode to a beloved, suffering homeland. The book charts the biographical, emotional, and literary journey of a woman moving from one place to another, attempting to return to her craft and put together the pieces of her life in the aftermath of family tragedy. Dominique writes eloquently about love, loss, and traumas both horrifically specific and tragically universal.

Publication Date: 2023

Summary:

Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1945, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang's reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amidst the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday lie. In her examination of Shanghai food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals, but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms--

Publication Date: 1936 / 1986

Summary:

"As a work of literature, Market Street rivals many of the most compelling creations of this and other periods of Chinese history in terms of its evocative power, universal accessibility, and rhetorical skill. As autobiography, it reveals the life and the general world view of a representative Chinese intellectual, a woman living in a male-oriented and male-dominated society in the chaotic period just prior to World War II. It describes a young woman's attempt to come to grips with the realities of her own life, thereby legitimizing her past to understand her present. Market Street is, in sum, literary autobiography at its finest."--Description from p. xix

Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

An Argentinian woman obsessed with art conflates personal events from her life in Buenos Aires with fascinating episodes from art history, refracting her personality through the canvases she studies.

Publication Date: 1978 / 2020

Summary:

In Avala Is Falling, Jovanović’s breakout success in 1978, a young woman challenges the expectations that teachers, parents, bus drivers, and doctors have for her. The “Avala” of the title refers to a mountain south of Belgrade which is home to some of Serbia’s most important nationalist monuments and shrines; it is also the site of the main mental hospital for the region, and its “falling” is the unexpected fulfillment of a prophecy from a traditional Serbian folk song. Jovanović’s use of stream of consciousness in her characters’ thinking and speaking, as well as of intertextuality in description and plot advancement heralded the arrival of an innovative new writer who was determined to break with the of traditional concerns of earlier women writers. This book is now recognized as much more than “jeans prose,” although the fame the book achieved under that characterization eventually pushed it to cult status. Jovanović is now considered a major avant-garde writer, whose stylistic innovations were as challenging as her women-centered themes.

Publication Date: 1980 / 2021

Summary:

Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with wealth's loneliness and odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues-with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion's garden full of intoxicated snails)-delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.

Publication Date: 2002 / 2021

Summary:

"Luvsandorjiin Ölziitögs (b. 1972) was born in the city of Dar-han and came to prominence during the early 1990s as one of Mongolia’s new generation of writers influenced by Western literature, and particularly by the new wave of Russian authors working at that time. She has consistently sought to expand the envelope of Mongolian fiction and is now one of very few Mongolians able to make a living from writing. Her work has been published outside Mongolia and is especially popular in South Korea. Ölziitögs’s style is a mixture of surrealism and dark comedy, but this combination, as in 'Raul and Raul,' seems to cover a compassionate sensitivity toward the plight of those who are simply trying to live a life in the world. ... [H]er writing challenges Mongolian readers’ ideas of what fiction should be, dealing with issues rarely addressed, such as sex and drugs and the problems of Mongolia’s modern youth."--Description from p. 271

Publication Date: 2019

Summary:

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement, 'I shot him between the eyes.' Everything in between is a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness, and as the tale proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. In this powerful novella, Natalia Ginzburg's writing is white-hot, fueled by rage, stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality; she transforms an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that might pose the question: Why don't more wives kill their husbands?--

Publication Date: 2014 / 2018

Summary:

No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers "freedom" to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.

Publication Date: 2015

Summary:

Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious.

Publication Date: 2017

Summary:

A writer struggles to come to terms with the death of her beloved mentor; the staging of an experimental play goes awry; time freezes for two lovers on a platform, waiting for the train that will take one of them away; a woman living in a foreign country discovers she has been issued the wrong ID. Emotionally haunting and intellectually stimulating, the seven stories in North Station represent the range and power of Bae Suah's distinctive voice and style, which delights in digressions, multiple storylines, and sudden ruptures of societal norms. Heavily influenced by the German authors she's read and translated, Bae's stories combine elements of Korean and European storytelling in a way that's unforgettable and mesmerizing--

Publication Date: 2023

Summary:

Though written at the end of the first half of the twentieth century this is essentially a nineteenth century novel written with a twentieth century sensibility. A few things give it away as a twentieth century novel - regular trains, even to remote rural areas, and a gramophone as well as the fact that, unlike most nineteenth century novels, none of the main characters survives unscarred. Indeed, most of them die, usually relatively unpleasant deaths. The other unusual feature is that there is no reference whatsoever to political events in the country. Napoleon is mentioned in passing but that is it--

Publication Date: 1998

Summary:

Bitter Soil collects four of Mahasweta Devi’s most powerful stories—‘Salt’, ‘Seed’, ‘The Witch’ and ‘Little Ones’—all set in the Palamau District of Jharkhand, a region inhabited by Adivasis where author had travelled extensively. As she says in her introduction, ‘My Palamau is a mirror of India.’ These harsh, hard-hitting pieces are, in her own words, amongst the most important of her prolific writing career. Written in the 1980s, they resonate with anger against the exploitation she witnessed firsthand as well as the complacent hypocrisy of the upper castes and classes. The stories remain as relevant today as they were decades ago.

Publication Date: 2022

Summary:

A selection of bracingly honest, wry, and luminous poetry from the award-winning Egyptian poet Iman Mersal. Iman Mersal is Egypt's--indeed, the Arab world's--great outsider poet. Over the past three decades, she has crafted a voice that is ferocious and tender, street-smart and vulnerable. Her early work captures the energies of Cairo's legendary literary bohème, a home for "Lovers of cheap weed and awkward confessions / Anti-State agitators" and "People like me." These are poems of wit and rage, freaked by moments of sudden beauty, like "the smell of guava" mysteriously wafting through the City of the Dead. Other poems bear witness to agonizing loss and erotic temptation, "the breath of two bodies that never had enough time / and so took pleasure in their mounting terror." Mersal's most recent work illuminates the trials of displacement and migration, as well as the risks of crossing boundaries, personal and political, in literature and in life. The Threshold gathers poems from Mersal's first four collections of poetry: A Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons (1995), Walking as Long as Possible (1997), Alternative Geography (2006), and Until I Give Up the Idea of Home (2013). Taken together, these works chart a poetic itinerary from defiance and antagonism to the establishment of a new, self-created sensibility. At their center is the poet: indefatigably intelligent, funny, flawed, and impossible to pin down. As she writes, "I'm pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind."

Publication Date: 1995

Summary:

Latin American intellectual history is largely founded on essayistic writing. Women's essays have always formed a part of this rich tradition, yet they have seldom received the respect they merit and are often omitted entirely from anthologies. This volume and its earlier companion, Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, seek to remedy that neglect. This book collects thirty-six notable essays by twenty-two women writers. All of the essays are here translated into English for the first time, many by the same scholars who wrote critical studies of the authors in the first volume. Each author's work is also prefaced by a brief biographical sketch.

Publication Date: 2022

Summary:

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity--

Publication Date: 2022

Summary:

In the years since her tragic death in a car accident at age thirty-two in 1967, Forough Farrokhzad has become a poet as iconic and influential as Lorca or Akhmatova, celebrated as a pioneer of modernist Iranian literature and as a leading figure of contemporary world literature. Farrokhzad, as Elizabeth Gray writes in the preface, "remains a beacon to artists, especially women and marginalized artists, who seek freedom in all its forms." This thoughtfully curated, deftly translated selection of Farrokhzad's poems includes work from her whole writing life, early to late. Readers will thoroughly treasure this expansive poet of the quotidian; of longing, loss, and desire; of classical reinvention; of lexical variation and sonic beauty; of terrifying wisdom, hope, and grief.

Publication Date: 2016

Summary:

Baba Dunja is a Chernobyl returnee. Together with a motley bunch of former neighbours, they set off to create a new life for themselves in the radioactive no-man's land. Geiger counter and irradiated forest fruits be damned, there in that abandoned patch of Earth they have everything they need. Terminally ill Petrov passes the time reading love poems in his hammock; Marja takes up with 100-year-old Sidorow; Baba Dunja whiles away her days writing letters to her daughter ... rural bliss reigns, until one day a stranger turns up in the village, and the small settlement faces annihilation once again. With her trade-mark wry humour Bronsky tells the story of a community that shouldn't exist, and of a very unusual woman who late in life finds her own version of paradise.

Publication Date: 2013

Summary:

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers's multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel's widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator's deathly boredom, bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.--Page 4 of cover.

Publication Date: 2009

Summary:

Masterworks of economy and acuity, these brief, trenchant tales by Russian author and playwright Petrushevskaya, selected from her wide-ranging but little translated oeuvre over the past 30 years, offer an enticement to English readers to seek out more of her writing. The tales explore the inexplicable workings of fate, the supernatural, grief and madness, and range from adroit, straightforward narratives to bleak fantasy. Frequently on display are the decrepit values of the Soviet system, as in The New Family Robinson, where a family tries to outsmart everyone by relocating to a ramshackle cabin in the country. Domestic problems get powerful and tender treatment; in My Love, a long-suffering wife and mother triumphs over her husband's desire for another woman. Darker material dominates the last section of the book, with tortuous stories, heavy symbolism and outright weirdness leading to strange and unexpected places. Petrushevskaya's bold, no-nonsense portrayals find fresh, arresting expression in this excellent translation.

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

Follows an unnamed female Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple who has fled to the far reaches of the earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down-- that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation betrays both sense and one's senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective's quest, though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.

Publication Date: 2016 / 2020

Summary:

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.

Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

For ten years, Yona has been stuck behind a desk as a coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specializing in vacation packages to destinations devastated by disaster and climate change. Her work life is uneventful until trouble arises in the form of a predatory colleague. To forestall any disruption of business-as-usual, Jungle makes Yona a proposition: a paid vacation to the desert island of Mui. But Yona must pose as a tourist and assess whether Jungle should continue their partnership with the unprofitable destination. Yona travels to the remote island, whose major attraction is an underwhelming sinkhole, a huge disappointment to the customers who've paid a premium. Soon Yona discovers the resort's plan to fabricate a catastrophe in the interest of regaining their good standing with Jungle--and the manager enlists Yona's help. Yona must choose between the callous company to whom she's dedicated her life, or the possibility of a fresh start in a powerful new position. As she begins to understand the cost of the manufactured disaster, Yona realizes that the lives of Mui's citizens are in danger--and so is she.

Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

Ancco looks back at her own tumultuous adolescence, from the not-so-distanced lens of a twenty-something. A mother's struggles mirror her teen's. Memories of care between the cartoonist and her grandmother -- before her faculties had started to fade. Quick judgments look ugly through the eyes of a teen, who's leaning into her own sense of self. Whether it's friends, family, animals, or even a stranger on the internet, the stories in Nineteen exude generosity and love, while being steeped in the malaise and distractions of youth.

Publication Date: 1940 / 1966

Summary:

Kallocain is a 1940 dystopian novel by Swedish novelist Karin Boye, which envisions a future of drab terror. Seen through the eyes of idealistic scientist Leo Kall, Kallocain is a depiction of a totalitarian world state. An important aspect of the novel is the relationships and connections between the various characters, such as the marriage of the main character and his wife Linda Kall, and the feelings of jealousy and suspicion that may arise in a society with heavy surveillance and legal uncertainty. The plot centers on Leo Kall, written in the form of a diary or memoir. Kall lives with his wife Linda Kall in a city intended for chemical industry. Leo is a scientist, who is initially very loyal to the government and develops the truth drug Kallocain. It has the effect that anyone who takes it will reveal anything, even things of which they were not consciously aware. Major themes include the notion of the self in a totalitarian state, the meaning of life, and the power of love. Apart from the laboratory work and testing by Leo Kall, much of the novel takes place in the home of Leo and Linda.

Publication Date: 2009

Summary:

Available for the first time in English, the ten short stories by modern Korean women collected here touch in one way or another on issues related to gender and kinship politics. All of the protagonists are women who face personal crises or defining moments in their lives as gender-marked beings in a Confucian, patriarchal Korean society. Their personal dreams and values have been compromised by gender expectations or their own illusions about female existence. They are compelled to ask themselves "Who am I?" "Where am I going?" "What are my choices?" Each story bears colorful and compelling testimony to the life of the heroine. Some of the stories celebrate the central character's breakaway from the patriarchal order; others expose sexual inequality and highlight the struggle for personal autonomy and dignity. Still others reveal the abrupt awakening to mid-life crises and the seasoned wisdom that comes with accepting the limits of old age. The stories are arranged in chronological order, from the earliest work by Korea's first modern woman writer in 1917 to stories that appeared in 1995-approximately one from each decade. Most of the writers presented are recognized literary figures, but some are lesser-known voices. The introduction presents a historical overview of traditions of modern Korean women's fiction, situating the selected writers and their stories in the larger context of Korean literature. Each story is accompanied by a biographical note on the author and a brief critical analysis. A selected bibliography is provided for further reading and research. Questioning Minds marks a departure from existing translations of Korean literature in terms of its objectives, content, and format. As such it will contribute to the growth of Korean studies, increasing the availability of material for teaching Korean literature in English, and stimulate readership of its writers beyond the confines of the peninsula.

Publication Date: 1002 / 2006

Summary:

Written by the court gentlewoman Sei Shonagon, ostensibly for her own amusement, The Pillow Book offers a fascinating exploration of life among the nobility at the height of the Heian period, describing the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion, and whim dominated, while harsh reality was kept firmly at a distance. Moving elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society, and her own flirtations, Sei Shonagon provides a witty and intimate window on a woman's life at court in classical Japan.

Publication Date: 2015

Summary:

A harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma. Kirkus Reviews

Publication Date: c. 2007 / 2021

Summary:

"Haltarin Bolor- Erdene (b. 1975) was born in Ulaanbaatar and worked as a journalist on the city’s free newspapers until 2007, since when she has lived in Paris, France, with her family. She writes short stories and novellas and published her first novel, The Running Woman, in 2019. 'Room for Rent' is an example of how Mongolian literature is responding to the horror and supernatural genres. More than the unnamed student, it is perhaps the claustrophobia of the eponymous room that is the central character of this story. ... [I]n Bolor- Erdene’s story there is a presence, a tangible feeling of menace, which might call to mind the work of Edgar Allen Poe, which has been available in Mongolian translation since the 1930s."--Description from p. 261

Publication Date: 1995

Summary:

A tender story about three sisters coming of age in Greece over the course of three summers, now available after being out of print for over twenty years. Three Summers is the story of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a big old house surrounded by a beautiful garden are Maria, the oldest sister, as sexually bold as she is eager to settle down and have a family of her own; beautiful but distant Infanta; and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to figure out their parents and other members of the tribe of adults, take note of the weird ways of friends and neighbors, worry about and wonder who they are. Karen Van Dyck's translation captures all the light and warmth of this modern Greek classic.