Women in Translation 2024
As you may know, August is Women in Translation Month, when women translators and authors are in the spotlight! So, I should have posted this at the beginning of August, but oh well. Anyways, for each day in August, I have shone a spotlight on one WIT book published this year (2024). Check them (book cover/synopsis) out below!
"The Book Censor's Library" by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Sawad Hussain & Ranya Abdelrahman
Synopsis
A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.
The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish--allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.
Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell's 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor's Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.
"From Savagery" by Alejandra Banca, translated by Katie Brown
Synopsis
Electric, defiant, and singing with melancholia, Alejandra Banca's devastating debut throws its arms around a displaced generation of young Venezuelan migrants, reveling in the clamor and beauty of their day-by-day survival.
Below the rooftops of Barcelona's historic avenues, in the shadow of the Sagrada Família and its fleet of construction cranes, thrums a vital pulse: meal-delivery bikers, sex workers, strung out artists, anti-capitalist squatters, undocumented shopgirls, fledgeling drug dealers, and a thousand more lives that cross and knit together at the lowest level of Spain's urban tumult. The young expats of these stories careen through crowded streets, night clubs, and dating apps with a devil-may-care abandon that belies their precarious circumstances. Tragedy will erupt and then ebb in an instant, receding in the rearview like a roadside collision and haunting those that push on. Running on fumes and paltry tips, Banca's beleaguered characters race along a knife's edge and find unexpected solace in moments of shared vulnerability; a knowing thread that unites these strangers in a strange land.
In this English PEN Award-winning translation by Katie Brown, From Savagery announces Alejandra Banca as a resplendent and masterful new voice in Latin American literature--one that will take readers by storm.
"Blue Notes" by Anne Cathrine Bomann, translated by Caroline Waight
Synopsis
How much grief is too much? How far should we go to avoid pain? From the author of the international bestselling novel Agatha comes a literary medical thriller about loss, empathy, science, Big Pharma, and societal norms.
A Danish university research group is finishing its study of a new medicine, Callocain: the world's first pill for grief. But psychology professor Thorsten Gjeldsted suspects that someone has manipulated the test results to hide a disturbing side effect. When no one believes him, he teams up with two students to investigate: Anna, who has recently experienced traumatic grief herself, and Shadi, whose statistical skills might prevent her from living a quiet life in the shadows. Together, these sleuthing academics try to discover what's really happening before the drug becomes widely available.
Blue Notes is brimming with ethical and existential ideas about the search for identity and one's place in the world, while offering a highly original literary adventure that ultimately underscores the healing power of love.
"Pale Shadows" by Dominique Fortier, translated by Rhonda Mullins
Synopsis
Dickinson after her death: a novel of the trio of women who brought Emily Dickinson's poems out of the shadows When she died, Emily Dickinson left behind hundreds of texts scribbled on scraps of paper. She also left behind three formidable women: her steadfast sister, Lavinia; her brother's ambitious mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd; and his grief-stricken wife, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. With no clear instructions from Emily, these three women would, through mourning and strife, make from those scraps of paper a book that would change American literature.
From the author of Paper Houses, this is the improbable, almost miraculous, story of the birth of a book years after the death of its author. In these sensitive and luminous pages, Dominique Fortier explores, through Dickinson's poetry, the mysterious power that books have over our lives, and the fragile and necessary character of literature.
"Living Things" by Munir Hachemi, translated by Julia Sanches
Synopsis
This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction.
Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing…
"Woodworm" by Layla Martínez, translated by Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott
Synopsis
For fans of Samanta Schweblin and Fernanda Melchor, Layla Martinez’s debut novel with its grisly, mystical vision of justice for an unjust world, announces a terrifying new voice in international horror.
The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. It was built by a smalltime hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.
In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as “a house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge,” this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.
"The Case of Cem" by Vera Mutafchieva, translated by Angela Rodel
Synopsis
It's 1481, and as seen from the centers of power in Rome and Venice, the cultures of Europe are under threat from the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. When the exalted Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror dies his eldest son, Bayezid, takes the throne. However, discontented factions within the Ottoman army urge Mehmed's second son, Cem, a well-educated and experienced warrior, to oppose his brother's ascension, setting off a ruthless power struggle and forcing Cem into long years of exile, a pawn for European powers that are struggling to maintain the order they have imposed on the continent over the course of centuries.
The Case of Cem, Vera Mutafchieva's sprawling novel of court intrigue, maintains lasting resonance for being a personal exploration of emigration and loss as told through the historical era during which the politics of the East and West were sketched out with utter clarity. These early lines of demarcation, as voiced through Christian and Muslim emissaries, power hungry rulers, unflinching warriors, and poets, have indelibly influenced the word as we know it today.
"My Name Is Sita" by Bea Vianen, translated by Kristen Gehrman
Synopsis
Bea Vianen rose to prominence as a writer in both her native Suriname and its European colonizer, the Netherlands, with the publication of My Name is Sita in 1969.
Set in the 1950s in the Caribbean Dutch colony during an era of social and ethnic turmoil, this coming-of-age novel shadows Sita, a young East Indian girl, as she copes with the loss of her mother and defends herself against her father's many mistakes, while also trying to care for her younger brother and carve out a life for herself in a staunchly rigid culture. Beneath the festering, lush, and humid tropical setting, Sita's struggles only become more difficult with her best friend's departure and an unwanted pregnancy.
Now considered a contemporary Dutch classic, My Name is Sita makes it all too clear what women have had to, and continue to, sacrifice in the name of claiming their identity.
"Tongueless" by Lau Yee-Wa, translated by Jennifer Feeley
Synopsis
A gripping psychological thriller that sheds light on the current political situation in Hong Kong.
Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin--or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure and dies by suicide, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.
Sharp, darkly humorous, and politically pointed, Tongueless presciently engages with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city's uniqueness--especially its language--is at risk of being erased.
"In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems" by Joyce Mansour, translated by C. Francis Fisher
Synopsis
The first English-language collection focused on the later works of Joyce Mansour, an Arab-Jewish Surrealist poet who was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s and settled in Paris.
Mansour’s late poems chart constellations of desire, femininity, and dream. Considered by Andre Bréton to be the preeminent Surrealist of the post-war period, Mansour brings this masculine movement into a feminine realm never-before-imagined. She insists on a forgotten or perhaps vehemently denied eventuality of women’s equality: their ability to do harm, to be violent: “Why tear fire from the impalpable sky / When it already grows and smolders in me / Why throw your glove into the crowd / Tomorrow is a livid stump.” In the Glittering Maw is poet C. Francis Fisher’s first published translation and includes a preface by eminent Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws.
"You" by Chantal Neveu, translated by Erín Moure
Synopsis
From poet Chantal Neveu, author of the award-winning collection This Radiant Life, comes a book-length poem that plunges us more deeply into the notion of the idyll and into the polyhedric structure of love.
you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship.
Personal autonomy and the formation of "self" are nourished here by multiples--I, you, s/he. The voice in you reclaims life from change and time and affirms it anew.
"Plum Blossom Wine" by Li Qingzhao, translated by Sibyl James and Kang Xuepei
Synopsis
Plum Blossom Wine, poems by Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao translated by Sibyl James and Kang Xuepei, gives voice to an important female Chinese poet writing in a time when literature was dominated by men. James and Kang bring a contemporary sensibility to their translations, reading Li not as scholars but as modern women. They offer the reader an intimate glimpse into Li’s life, letting these poems full of wistful longing resonate across the centuries like a temple bell just rung.
"Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana" by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translated by July Westhale
Synopsis
The poems in Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana are a call-and-response. Part translation, part conversation, and part footnote, this collection considers how desire and divinity are intimately acquainted. Tactically, the experience of it is akin to reading someone's private text messages; on one side July Westhale's translations of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. On the other, Westhale's response to them. There is something about both the process of translation and the process of coming into wholeness within queer desire that is akin: the seams of both show. Meaning is made through iteration, then reiteration. Through intimacy with, and intimacy without (other bodies, and people to translate them). At the end, what the reader has is a collection every bit as complex as how Sor Juana described her lovers: both “bedroom and bullring."
"A Good Life" by Virginie Grimaldi, translated by Hildegarde Serle
Synopsis
Full of humor and compassion, a profound exploration of sisterhood, healing, and the ineffable beauty of life from France's most beloved contemporary novelist.Laughter, tears, the transformative power of love, unexpected revelations, and striking natural beauty: these are the ingredients that combine to make best-selling author Virginie Grimaldi's American debut the feel-good read of 2024. Emma and Agathe are sisters.
They were thick as thieves when they were young but have always been as different as can be. Agathe, the younger sister, is disorderly, chaotic, and fiery. Five years older, Emma has always been the more mature sister, the defender, the protector, the worrier. Their relationship as adults is scarred by a tragedy that transformed their happy, ordinary childhoods into something much more complex and challenging. For a long time, Emma hasn't wanted to be involved in Agathe's life. But then they must return together to the Basque Country, to the house of their adored grandmother, to empty out her home and in the process to reconcile, to remember, and to pour out what is in their hearts.
The story alternates between Agathe and Emma's childhood and their present day, with everything in between, and readers see them as young girls, teenagers, young women, mothers, wives, partners, individuals, sisters. This is a story that encompasses whole lives, complex lives, women's lives, asking all the while how the scars of the past can be healed and what, in the end, is a good life.
"Tidal Waters" by Velia Vidal, translated by Annie McDermott
Synopsis
An epistolary, fictional account of one woman moving towards happiness in the black community of Colombia's Pacific coast.
After a long absence, Vel has come home to Chocó - to the Afro-Colombian community, to her family, to the sea. This is where the Pacific meets the Caribbean, where she's establishing herself anew. And the record she keeps is a series of letters to a friend, clarifying for herself where she stands, as she describes that homecoming to another. Vel works to build a literary centre, writing career, and festival with and for the people there. But her return to Chocó is also a claim-staking of her decision to pursue happiness now; an account of her immersion in the towns and rivers and forests she came from; and a redefinition of her relationship to sex and love in real time. And Tidal Waters is a vision of how creating something (for your community, for yourself) is a way of reading and writing your way into a known place and a new self.
"Forgotten on Sunday" by Valérie Perrin, translated by Hildegarde Serle
Synopsis
An unforgettable story about an unlikely friendship and about healing the wounds of a broken past from the million-copy bestselling author of Fresh Water for Flowers
Justine is 21 years old and has lived with her grandparents and her cousin Jules since the death of her parents. As a nursing assistant at a retirement home, she spends much of her days listening to her residents' stories.
After bonding with Hélène, an almost 100-year-old resident, the two women slowly reveal their stories to one another. Whilst Justine helps Hélène to relive her memories of love and war, Hélène encourages Justine to confront the secrets of her own past, and the loss she keeps buried deep within.
One day, a mysterious phone detailing a shocking revelation shakes the retirement home to its core. At once humorous and melancholic, Valérie Perrin's novel depicts the consequences of undeclared love and, in her inimitable way, portrays once again how the past is never really past.
"The Joyful Song of the Partridge" by Paulina Chiziane, translated by David Brookshaw
Synopsis
A roiling chronicle of motherhood and colonization from a writer who "alternates between a dramatic, high-octane style and a terse and humorous frankness" (Sheila Heti)
Recipient of the 2021 Camões Prize, the most important award for literature in the Portuguese language
A potent whirl of history, mythology, and grapevine chatter, The Joyful Song of the Partridge absorbs readers into its many hiding places and along the wandering paths of its principal characters, whose stark words will stay with you long after the journey is done.
No one knows where Maria des Dores came from. Did she ride in on the armored spines of crocodiles, was she carried many miles in the jaws of fish?
The only clear fact is that she is here, sitting naked in the river bordering a town where nothing ever happens.
The townspeople murmur restlessly that she is possessed by perverse impulses. They interpret her arrival as an omen of crop failure or, in more hopeful tones, a sign that womankind will soon seize power from the greedy hands of men.
As The Joyful Song of the Partridge unfolds, Paulina Chiziane spirals back in time to Maria's true origins: the days of Maria's mother and father when the pressure to assimilate in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique formed a distorting bond on the lives of black Mozambicans.
"The Wildcat Behind Glass" by Alki Zei, translated by Karen Emmerich
Synopsis
Melia is spellbound by the stuffed wildcat in her family's living room--her cousin swears that it comes to life and roams the streets at night. When she finds a signed note from the animal with secret instructions, a thrilling and dangerous adventure begins.
For Melia and her sister Myrto, summer means a break from Grandfather's history lessons and weeks of running free at the seaside with their ragtag group of friends. Best of all, cousin Nikos will visit and tell his fabulous stories about the taxidermied wildcat, which opens its blue glass eye when it wants to do good deeds and its black one when it makes trouble. The black eye must be open lately because all the adults have been acting strangely, arguing about politics and fearful of the police. Soon even the children are divided--who can Melia trust? And can the wildcat help keep her family safe?
Set in Greece during the 1930s, when the nation was torn apart by fascism, The Wildcat Behind Glass is an unforgettable tale of family, humanity, and what it means to be free. From its 1963 release to the dozens of international editions and honors that followed including a Mildred L. Batchelder Award, the novel has enchanted generations of young readers. Now, a fresh English translation--the first in over 50 years--breathes new life into the timeless story.
"Nauetakuan, a Silence for a Noise" by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, translated by Howard Scott
Synopsis
Monica, a young woman studying art history in Montreal, has lost touch with her Innu roots. When an exhibition unexpectedly articulates a deep, intergenerational wound, she begins to search for stronger connections to her Indigeneity. A new friendship with Katherine, an Indigenous woman whose life is filled with culture and community, emphasizes for Monica the possibilities of turning from assimilation and toxic masculinity to something deeper and more universal.
Travelling across the continent, from Eastern Canada to Vancouver to Mexico City, Monica connects with other Indigenous artists and thinkers, learning about their traditional ways and the struggles of other Nations. Throughout these journeys, she is guided by visions of giant birds and ancestors that draw her back home to Pessamit. Reckonings with family and floods await, but amidst strange tides, she reconnects to her language, Innu-aimun, and her people.
A timely, riveting story of reclamation, matriarchies, and the healing power of traditional teachings, Nauetakuan, a silence for a noise affirms how reconnecting to lineage and community can transform Indigenous futures.
"A Long Walk from Gaza" by Asmaa Alatawna, translated by Caline Nasrallah, edited by Michelle Hartman
Synopsis
The violence of life in Gaza which has taken on immense proportions for the whole world to see is intimately rendered here in a human story of resistance and resilience.
In the tradition of Palestinian women writers, Asmaa Alatawna a has gifted us a novel that is both personal and political, that exposes both the occupation and the patriarchy. A Long Walk from Gaza is a coming-of-age story that follows its teenage protagonist through her battles with a strict and abusive father, the exhilaration of her first crush, confrontations with occupation soldiers, and the heartbreak of leaving her home Gaza for a new life in Europe. Beginning in Europe and working backward to her own birth and early childhood, Alatawna's creative narration mirrors the traumas of her life and her people.
A Long Walk from Gaza not only exposes the harshness of both male authority and the stifling of the dreams of girls in parallel with the devastating conditions Palestinians endure under a brutal Israeli occupation, but also the challenges of fleeing these for a cold, alienating life in Europe. Alatawna lays these bare within a story that also showcases moments of humor, joy, and the human capacity to survive and thrive at all costs. She skillfully weaves together the challenges of growing up in occupied Palestine while exposing the many intersections of violence, patriarchy, and growing up in a society that offers girls little to no compassion. Her teenage protagonist's feminist point of view is fresh and honest, powerfully conveying the heartbreaking truths of her life.
At heart, A Long Walk from Gaza is a tale of freedom. Each of the characters is psychically wounded by their circumstances and each resists in their own way. Gaza comes to life in Alatawna's novel, showing a rich and diverse society--its flaws along with its beauty, showing us worlds, which are being destroyed and some of which no longer exist today.
"Not Even the Sound of a River" by Hélène Dorion, translated by Jonathan Kaplansky
Synopsis
Not Even the Sound of a River is a profound and moving tale of love's phantom pains as shared through the relationships between three generations of mothers and daughters.
Hanna drives down the St. Lawrence River to her late mother's hometown, hoping to find out more about the distant woman who began to reveal herself only through notebooks discovered in her effects. As the river widens, so does Hanna's understanding of the matriarchs in her family. She learns that her mother's true love, Antoine, died on the river when he was twenty, and that her grandmother also lost a young love to the water. Both remained shipwrecked after tragedy, their tales mirroring other survivors'--such as the few who survived the Empress of Ireland sinking, when more than a thousand people lost their lives on the same river in 1914.
Through multiple perspectives, newspaper accounts, and documents, Dorion exquisitely describes the depths of love, the reality of living when dreams have failed us, and the complex nuance of blood ties. Not Even the Sound of a River is a gentle, exquisite story that defies time or place.
"Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel" by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky
Synopsis
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself "the patient," is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, "What have you done to your head? I don't want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp!" He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik...
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
"Chimera" by Phoebe Giannisi, translated by Brian Sneeden
Synopsis
In her third collection in English, Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics that blends field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of the Vlachs, a nomadic people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans, who speak their own language. In these poems, day-to-day activities such as shearing and shepherding mix with snippets of conversations, oral tradition, and song--locating a larger story in this ancient marriage between humans and animals. Through her poetry and fieldwork, this mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form in what the Greek newspaper Kathimerini calls "a bold achievement....a studio wherein poems and other texts, other voices, become exhibited."
"If Only" by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund
Synopsis
A passionate and groundbreaking bestseller from one of Norway's most highly-regarded and award-winning novelists, for readers of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion and Coco Mellors' Cleopatra and Frankenstein
A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.
So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.
"Salt Journals: Tunisian Women on Political Imprisonment" edited by Haifa Zangana, Christalla Yakinthou, & Virginie Ladisch, and translated by Katharine Halls & Nariman Youssef
Synopsis
“Salt Journals” is a compelling collection of essays by Tunisian women, sharing their personal experiences with dictatorship and oppression. While rooted in the history and culture of Tunisia, these narratives reflect universal feelings of isolation, pain, and the indomitable quest for freedom. Drawn from a variety of different professions, including a lawyer, an engineer, a nurse, a student, and a city council member, among others, these women are contesting the culture of silence surrounding women’s prison narratives. Employing words as their weapons of nonviolent resistance, the authors recount the harsh realities of a militarized state and its oppressive prison system. Their creative defiance against state repression emerges not just as a means of survival, but as a profound act of dissidence, reclaiming control from the brutality imposed upon their lives. A testament to the power of self-representation, “Salt Journals” opens a vital space for dialogue on the necessity of empathy, resilience, and the importance of speaking out in the face of tyranny.
"Seviyye Talip" by Halide Edib Adivar, translated by Iclal Vanwesenbeeck
Synopsis
From the most acclaimed Turkish woman writer of the twentieth century comes a novel of violent political uprisings, opera, adultery, polygamy, modernity, liberty, and exile in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Set in the early twentieth century, the novel follows Fahir, a philosopher, idealist, and reformist who graduates from Oxford University and returns to Istanbul after a voluntary (but possibly compulsory) exile. In the midst of political turmoil and social upheaval, Fahir finds himself embroiled in a love triangle with Macide, a traditional Muslim Turkish woman, and Seviyye, a rebellious Turkish soprano who defies social and religious norms. A bestseller in Turkey in 1910, the novel features the first-ever Turkish soprano protagonist and is interwoven with operatic references and landscapes from turn-of-the-century Istanbul and Cairo.
"Caesaria" by Hanna Nordenhök, translated by Saskia Vogel
Synopsis
On a remote country estate in the 19th century, a renowned obstetrician keeps a young girl that he once carved out of her mother's body. It is the dawn of modern gynaecology, when the female body appears as a cryptic landscape and male hubris reigns.
The girl lives a dollhouse existence, characterized by supervision and punishment, assault and incarceration. Here, dirt and runaway visions dominate, while vast skies and sticky nature rub against her confinement.
Caesaria is part gothic novel, part fairy tale told in lush and elegant prose. These pages radiate a low-level dread, probing gender warfare and class oppression with dreamlike prose. What is reality to those who have grown up trapped in their own bodies, relying upon their own senses, without any contact with the world outside? Nordenhök shares an astonishing answer, almost mythological in scope, through the story of one eponymous girl.
"The House of the Edrisis" (Vol. 1) by Ghazaleh Alizadeh, translated by M. R. Ghanoonparvar
Synopsis
Celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh's The House of the Edrisis is a novel deeply rooted in historical and cultural significance inviting readers into a world of revolution, power, and societal transformation. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the unfolding drama among a colorful cast of disgraced family members and disillusioned revolutionaries.
Set in Central Asia, Alizadeh's story cleverly parallels the Islamic Revolution in Iran and offers an intimate portrait of both young ideologues-turned-tyrants and jaded women whose hope for change slowly fades. With a sardonic tone and elements of black comedy and farce, The House of the Edrisis offers an engrossing reflection on a turbulent history and the enduring spirit of men and women living through it.
"Forbidden Notebook" by Alba de Céspedes, translated by Ann Goldstein
Synopsis
With a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri, “Forbidden Notebook” is a classic domestic novel by the Italian-Cuban feminist writer Alba de Céspedes, whose work inspired contemporary writers like Elena Ferrante.
In this modern translation by acclaimed Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein, Forbidden Notebook centers the inner life of a dissatisfied housewife living in postwar Rome.
Valeria Cossati never suspected how unhappy she had become with the shabby gentility of her bourgeois life--until she begins to jot down her thoughts and feelings in a little black book she keeps hidden in a closet. This new secret activity leads her to scrutinize herself and her life more closely, and she soon realizes that her individuality is being stifled by her devotion and sense of duty toward her husband, daughter, and son. As the conflicts between parents and children, husband and wife, and friends and lovers intensify, what goes on behind the Cossatis' facade of middle-class respectability gradually comes to light, tearing the family's fragile fabric apart.
An exquisitely crafted portrayal of domestic life, “Forbidden Notebook” recognizes the universality of human aspirations.
"Another Person" by Kang Hwagil, translated by Clare Richards
Synopsis
A compulsively readable and razor-sharp campus novel about the impact of power and consent in a university setting
Perfect for fans of Cho Nam-joo, “I May Destroy You,” and “If We Were Villains” by M. L. Rio
Riveting and uncompromising, “Another Person” explores the long-lasting consequences of the sexism and misogyny fostered in universities.
“Vacuum cleaner bitch.”
When Jina sees this anonymous comment on a forum it forces her out of her stupor. It is posted on a website dissecting her public allegations of workplace sexual assault, the backlash to which forced her to quit her job. She has spent months glued to her laptop screen, junk-food packaging piling up around her, tracking the hate campaign that's raging against her online. This post stands out from the noise, for it could only have been made by someone who knew her as a student at university.
The comment stirs something deeply repressed. So Jina returns to Anjin University, and to the toxic culture that destroyed the lives of many female students including one, Ha Yuri, who died tragically and mysteriously not long before Jina left. Somewhere within Jina's memories is the truth about what happened to Yuri all those years ago.
Told in alternating viewpoints, in sharp, intelligent and multi-layered prose, this powerful and necessary novel confronts issues of sexism and abuse on university campuses.
"Pink Slime" by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary
Synopsis
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford--a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows--even if staying means being left behind.
An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, “Pink Slime” is buoyed by humor and its narrator's resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.