Lists
by Powell's Staff, November 29, 2023 9:33 AM
Here we are, with our final literature in translation round-up of 2023! And what a year it’s been, full of great books from around the world, all enthusiastically recommended by Powell’s booksellers. We’ll be back with a new post in January 2024, but until then, we hope you enjoy these nine new titles, released in November. On this list, you’ll find a tender novel about friendship from Mexico; “a sordid tale of a man on the run” from a Brazilian legend; a Lebanese-French author’s wild tale that’s “gorgeously and breathlessly told”; a French novel about a young woman battling insomnia; an Italian feminist classic; a tender Romanian novel; a kaleidoscopic and fun portrait of a small village in France; a masterful memoir from a Hungarian author and playwright; and a French novel about the surveillance economy. Happy reading! We can't wait to see you in the new year.
by Jazmina Barrera (tr. Christina MacSweeney)
Translated from the Spanish
Cross-Stitch, Jazmin’s debut novel, following her book-length essay, Linea Nigra, which came out in English last year, is a tender, engrossing account of a close friendship between three young women, as told through the eyes of the grown-up Mila after she finds out one of her friends has passed away. As Mila helps to plan the funeral, she thinks back on their friendship, reassessing her memories with what she now knows about the troubled adult one of her friends would become. Cross-Stitch is a compassionate and beautifully written portrait of friendship, needlework, and art, in a note-perfect translation from Christina MacSweeney. — Kelsey F.
by Clarice Lispector (tr. Benjamin Moser)
Translated from the Portuguese
With the publication of The Apple in the Dark, New Directions concludes their ambitious project of retranslating all of Clarice Lispector's fiction. This book, like many of Lispector's stories, is a sordid tale of a man on the run. His spiritual transfiguration, detailed in enigmatic prose, is a vehicle for the wisdom of this beloved, visionary writer who is finally getting her due in America. Even before its mysteries are revealed, we can expect to be enlightened and changed by The Apple in the Dark. Lispector herself, referring to her fiction, called it "the best one." — Nadia N.
by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (tr. Teresa Lavender Fagan)
Translated from the French
I've never read anything quite like The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey. Vénus Khoury-Ghata, a Lebanese-French author who won the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2000, focuses her story on an overlooked piece of the colonial history of Algeria, plucking out a person about whom history knows almost nothing and embroidering upon the facts beautifully and fancifully. Yudah is a fourteen-year-old from the Jewish Qurayza clan when she is suddenly affianced to the Emir to help cement relations and give protection to her people. Thus begins her adventure, since the Emir, unbeknownst to her tribe, has been imprisoned by the French and all his court is in exile in southern France. That she ends up on the French barricades in Paris in 1848, we know from history, but how she gets there is a wild tale gorgeously and breathlessly told. I'll definitely be seeking out more of Khoury-Ghata's work. — Jennifer R.
by Frederika Amalia Finkelstein (tr. Isabel Cout and Christopher Elson)
Translated from the French
A twenty-something-year-old woman wanders the streets of 2010s Paris at night battling insomnia and intergenerational trauma. Her grandfather was a Holocaust survivor but has recently passed, and as she begins the difficult journey of processing that grief she begins to find a deeper understanding of how what he went through continues to affect her and her family and she begins to reconsider how the events of his life lead her to where she is today. This rather moving story is told in a slightly complex but beautiful way as you see both past and present through our protagonist's obsessive point of view. The repetition of her obsessions and hyper-fixations throughout the novel not only serves as a though-line, keeping us grounded in the semi-stream-of-consciousness world of this novel, but also helps create a more personal tie to this character as more is unveiled about her. A surreal but wonderful read I highly recommend. — Aster H.
by Alba de Céspedes (tr. Jill Foulston)
Translated from the Italian
I feel so lucky to have this thrilling new translation of the Italian feminist classic, Her Side of the Story, by Alba de Céspedes, a resistance fighter in Italy during World War II who was jailed twice during the war for her anti-fascist activities. The novel features Alessandra Corteggiani, a young woman of modest means who grows up in Rome under her starry-eyed, romantic mother until she is sent to the countryside in Abruzzo to live with her father's stern relatives. While there, the war begins, and when Alessandra returns to Rome, she unwittingly falls in love with a resistance fighter, who opens her eyes to the real dangers of the political situation in Italy. The book is both a brilliant psychological portrait of an intelligent young woman's growing pains as she tries to come into her own as she navigates family and gendered relationship roles, like a modern Jane Eyre or Madame Bovary, and a snapshot of a whole society in the interwar and WWII years. It's written in intimate, gorgeous, urgent prose, beautifully translated by Jill Foulston, and the story is peopled by so many well-drawn characters that it really comes alive. This is one of my favorite books of the year. — Jennifer R.
by Liliana Corobca (tr. Monica Cure)
Translated from the Romanian
Corobca's second novel is a short but sweet sojourn through the eyes of Cristina, a twelve-year-old girl left to care for her two younger brothers while their parents find work in foreign countries. Cristina's anecdotes of the mundane and everyday are full of the innocence and curiosity typical of children, making her an interesting lens through which to view the tragedy, and sometimes humor, of life in their poor, Moldovan village. Corobca takes care to suffuse this grim tale of sadness and poverty with love and amusement, and she writes about it all with a tenderness that can be felt on each page. — Madeline S.
by Mathias Énard (tr. Frank Wynne)
Translated from the French
Mathias Énard, the Prix Goncourt winner for his novel Compass, returns with The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, a book that is as riotous and strange as its title. When a neurotic graduate student David Mazon moves to a small French village, which he plans to write his anthropological doctoral thesis about, he finds himself in a town that’s caught up in a “wheel of time,” so every person and creature he encounters has been reincarnated. Énard weaves us between Mazon’s diary entries and in-depth character studies of the townspeople and the various bodies they’ve had over time. And, of course, we do get to go to the titular banquet. Empathetic and hilarious, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild is a kaleidoscopic and fun portrait of a small village and its very particular and unique ecosystem. — Kelsey F.
by Péter Nádas (tr. Judith Sollosy)
Translated from the Hungarian
FSG is simultaneously releasing volumes 1 and 2 of Péter Nádas’s memoir, Shimmering Details. In this first volume, Nádas, a Hungarian author and playwright, writes through the lens of the “shimmering details” of his memories, working to reconstruct them in order to tell the story of growing up in Budapest through the 20th century. The connections Nádas makes between his personal experiences and the historical moments he lived through fills the book with a particular emotional weight and resonance. This is a masterful memoir from a masterful author. — Kelsey F.
by Delphine de Vigan (tr. Alison Anderson)
Translated from the French
I am such a sucker for any book that looks at the ways we’re rewarded for participating in the surveillance economy, and how those rewards and that participation can quickly sour and turn insidious. The lives of two women, both of whom have very different relationships to reality TV and social media, find themselves on a collision course after Mélange Claux, who found social-media fame through near-constant posts about her children, is kidnapped and Clara Roussel is brought in to find her. A riveting, sparsely written look at the current state of our society. — Lucinda G.
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For more literature in translation, check out our recommendations from September and October.
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