Summer Reading Recommendations From Our Editors

What’s in the tote bags that the Two Lines editors are filling up for our vacations this summer? You won’t find much in the way of chick lit or cozy mysteries, but if you want to bewilder everyone else on the beach this summer, read on!

What could be more apropos for a summer reading list than writing from the land of the midnight sun? Production Editor Jessica Sevey says, “I’ve been reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 1 (tr. Don Bartlett), and I just can’t put it down! There’s something universal about his experiences — even though it’s about his life in Norway.”

Jessica has also discovered a Norwegian poet she likes: Gro Dahle. Right now she’s reading her A Hundred Thousand Hours, which includes the original Norwegian and the English translation by Rebecca Wadlinger. Reviewer Melissa Dickey says that in Dahle’s poems, “The house lives; the inanimate becomes animate; the domestic is an active, sexual, sometimes frightening sphere….” In other words, just the ticket for getting you out of the house and into the sunshine.

Associate Editor Marthine Satris recommends The Travels of Daniel Ascher — a slim, beautifully constructed debut novel by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat, translated by Adriana Hunter. Delightful yet resonant, the novel (published by Other Press in May 2015) follows a young woman as she moves to Paris and uncovers the secrets her family has kept for decades. Returning to the children’s adventure stories that made her uncle Daniel famous, Hélène discovers the loneliness and loss buried underneath his whimsy.

Marthine is also excited to spend some time this summer with Wave Books’ new edition of Mallarmé’s A Roll of the Dice. The long poem is recreated as a visual object by Robert Bononno and designer Jeff Clark, who collaborated on the translation (Jeff also designs our Two Lines journal covers, so we’re dedicated fans of his work, to say the least). Mallarmé conjures the abyss through oceanic images, so in Marthine’s opinion, it’s a perfect fit for those long July days, their “gaping depth like the hull / of a ship / listing from side to side.”

Scott Esposito, our marketing expert and maintainer of Two Lines’s web presence, plans to spend this summer with 2015 Best Translated Book Award winner Can Xue’s Vertical Motion and Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher.

The stories in Vertical Motion were translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, and the collection was published by Open Letter Books in 2011. “Trippy and surreal,” the novel will ease you into a “dream like trance” as the tide starts licking at your toes.

Scott delves further into the world of translation with Nobel Prize-winner Jelinek’s novel, published in English by Grove Atlantic in 2009. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel, it explores the outer limits of sexuality through the lens of a masochistic musician and her young, entranced student. The darkness at the heart of the Viennese story will give you shivers even on the muggiest of summer days.

So there you go! Some charming, disturbing, and entrancing reads to while away your vacation with, courtesy of the strange beings who occupy the offices here at Two Lines. Maybe you’ll even stumble one of us reading our recommendations if you’re walking on the foggy shore of the Pacific this summer. Until then!

Recommendations:
Can Xue, Vertical Motion. Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.
Déborah Lévy-Bertherat, The Travels of Daniel Ascher. Translated by Adriana Hunter.
Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Gro Dahle. A Hundred Thousand Hours. Translated by Rebecca Wadlinger.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 1. Translated by Don Bartlett.
Stephane Mallarmé, A Roll of the Dice. Translated by Robert Bononno and Jeff Clark.