CAT Holiday Gift Guide 2024

Grey Bees by Andrew Kurkov, trans. Boris Dralyuk (Deep Vellum)

Originally published in English translation in 2020 and newly relevant in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this book by one of Ukraine’s best known authors offers “a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict along the Russian border” with humor and humanity. Sergey is a beekeeper and one of only two people who have stayed behind in his small town in the “grey zone” between the Ukrainian and Russian front lines. He marks his days caring for his bees and feuding with the only other village resident, his longtime “frenemy.” As the fighting worsens he decides he must leave home to save his bees and allow them to pollinate. On his travels through the country he meets soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict.

Buy your copy today from East Bay Booksellers(opens in a new tab).

Celebration by Damir Karakaš, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac (Two Lines Press)

Former war reporter Damir Karakaš, who witnessed the violent breakup of the former Yugoslavia, revisits the history of his Croatian hometown through the story of Mijo’s return from fighting for the fascist Ustasi regime after World War II. Karakas takes a hard look at how poverty can lead to extremism. The dark atmosphere of war and generational trauma is offset by beautiful descriptions of a forest that offers comfort and plays a starrring role in the story . If you want a preview of the book, check out the trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation of the book from director Bruno Anković.

Buy your copy today from The Center for Fiction(opens in a new tab).

Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio, trans. Mia Spangenberg (Two Lines Press)

For anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider, Lowest Common Denominator is an absolute delight. An autofictional account of the author’s childhood growing up in conservative 1950s Finnish society, the book centers on a girl who is grappling with the contradictions of the world around her. She doesn’t understand why she can’t grow up to become a man; why her staunchly atheist, communist parents don’t share her fascination with Jesus, who wears a dress and has a beard; why she feels so alone even among her many family members. A truly unique voice in contemporary literature, Pirkko Saisio will reconnect you with your childhood wonder, something we could all benefit from. And stay tuned for her next book, BACKLIGHT, out this coming spring.

Buy your copy today from Books Are Magic(opens in a new tab).

Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber)

Not a translated book, but one that thinks deeply about what it is to translate and be translated, is Mary Jean Chan’s Bright Fear. Chan is a poet who grew up and lives between three languages, and this is a collection that explores the ragged and often sharp boundaries between languages and cultures, especially when dealing with family. Her poems are incisive, but some of my favorite moments are when she finds (and shares with her reader) moments of lightness or joy. And the poem “How It Must Be Said” has one of my favorite lines about translation this year: “I surrender to the sensation of being translated, and therefore seen.” Since what is translation but an act of pure empathy?

Buy your copy today directly from Faber & Faber(opens in a new tab).

Hugs and Cuddles by João Gilberto Noll, trans. Edgar Garbelotto (Two Lines Press)

Noll’s books almost all have narrators who have come unmoored, whether by choice or by circumstance. In Hugs & Cuddles it’s a teenage wrestling match that launches a young man into new possibilities about sex and love. He travels from a decommissioned nazi submarine into the depths of the Amazon looking to recreate that fleeting joy of his youth. Noll’s queer novel of the desire to form an identity outside the boundaries of gender and sexual identity is from before such novels were written. It’s dirty and confused and never apologetic. And even more thrilling is the translation by Edgar Garbelotto, whose deep love of the books gave Noll’s voice in English an even stronger and stranger tenor. We lost Edgar this past year; I can think of no better way to celebrate him than to reread this masterpiece of a translation.

Buy your copy today from Pilsen Community Books(opens in a new tab).

The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Rafeedie, trans. Dr. Muhammad Tutunji (1804 Books / Palestinian Youth Movement)

The secret life of Palestinian organizer and activist Kan’an—a hard life of isolation and discipline hidden away from Israeli forces—is the subject of Wisam Rafeedie’s The Trinity of Fundamentals, a long-suppressed work of Palestinian national literature. Based in Rafeedie’s lived experience, and written from the cofines of his Israeli imprisonent, this first-ever translation (provided by Dr. Muhammad Tutunji) is a mesmerizing and heartbreaking account of a life committed wholly to justice, to liberation, to revolution.

Buy your copy today from Politics & Prose(opens in a new tab).

Yesterday by Juan Emar, trans. Megan McDowell (New Directions)

What to make of a world where a public guillotining is a regular encounter, one of a handful of routine, possible yesterdays? Emar’s short surreal novel, which follows a highly lovable borgeouis couple as they attempt to feel anything at all (or are at the very least entertained) as they make their way through a confounding Chilean city.

Buy your copy today from City Lights Booksellers(opens in a new tab).

Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima, trans. Geraldine Harcourt (Picador)

The narrator of Territory of Light is newly separated from her husband and figuring out how to start a new life with her young daughter. Mother and daughter live in a small apartment that is flooded with light. In unadorned and emotionally direct prose, Tsushima captures the feeling of being unmoored from the past and faced with the task of reassembling yourself in the present.

Buy your copy today from Green Apple Books(opens in a new tab).

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

Creation Lake follows a freelance spy, winkingly named Sadie Smith, who was previously fired from the FBI, as she infiltrates an eco-activist commune in the French countryside. Sadie is unsparing in her judgements and amoral in her actions. Amidst her antics, which include drinking gas station white wine and shoplifting, she intercepts emails from an old man who lives in a cave, the de facto spiritual leader of the commune, who is obsessed with neanderthals. This is a page turner that is as entertaining as it is intelligent.

Buy your copy today from Telegraph Hill Books(opens in a new tab).

They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears by Johannes Anyuru, trans. Saskia Vogel (Two Lines Press)

A remarkably intense, beautifully wrought tale that combines the ingenuity of speculative fiction with today’s harsh political realities

Buy your copy today from P&T Knitwear(opens in a new tab).

Second Star by Philippe Delerm, trans. Jody Gladding (Archipelago Books)

Second Star is a series of lyrical meditations on life’s often overlooked joys, from peeling a clementine, sipping a cold mojito, to washing your windows. Whether biting into a bitter turnip or savoring a summer evening, Delerm pauses to consider each pang of pleasure. Vividly translated by Jody Gladding, these glimpses invite us to linger, as if each bite of a ripe watermelon, each exhaled breath on a bitterly cold day, each cloudy evening on the beach, were our last.

Buy your copy today from The Wild Detectives(opens in a new tab).

Sidetracks by Bei Dao, trans. Jeffrey Yang (New Directions)

Bei Dao’s masterful SIDETRACKS, in Jeffrey Yang’s glittering translation, serves as “the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language.” Here is a long poem that breaks out in every direction: it’s full of juxtapositions, recurring questions and images, and it tracks forward and backward in time, a literary chronicle of the poet’s exile. I found it mesmerizing and deeply moving.

Buy your copy today from Third Place Books(opens in a new tab).

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Shigeru Kayama, trans. Jeffrey Angles (Minnesota of Minnesota Press)

Everyone everywhere knows Godzilla, right? Even if you haven’t seen any of the films, Godzilla is the sort of cultural icon that is instantly familiar, the massive monster who rises from the depths of the sea. I had never read the book, which was published in 1955 after the original 1954 film, but my interest was piqued when I saw that the brilliant Jeffrey Angles had taken on the first translation into English. Indeed, it is an action-packed tale inflected with nuclear dread, but the ethical dilemmas are moving to me—Godzilla is both a victim and a weapon—and I found it worth reflecting, once again, on “humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness.”

By your copy today from Skylight Books(opens in a new tab).

About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler, trans. Jordan Stump (Two Lines Press)

This novel feels exactly like screaming into a pillow. It’s weird, all-consuming, and downright bizarre in every way that you imagine a one-on-one case study of your strange uncle would be. Perfect for someone who likes strange delights and is curious about anthropological depictions of madness, illness, and age.

Buy your copy today from Literati Bookstore(opens in a new tab).

The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine & Aviva Kana (The Dorothy Project)

When fairy tale meets detective whodunnit meets horror story… you get one fever dream of a book. A private investigator visits a remote island where people are disappearing—and nobody is talking about it. The secrets of the island are gruesome, mysterious, and downright freaky.

Buy your copy today from Elliott Bay Book Company(opens in a new tab).

Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin, trans. Megan McDowell (Riverhead Books)

This book takes the concept of being “a fly on the wall” to a whole new level. In the not-too-distant future, people can purchase kentukis, robotic animals with cameras for eyes that live in strangers’ homes. You can choose to control the kentuki or to have it live in your home, observing you whenever it wishes. Imagine someone watching you through the eyes of your dog. What would they see? How would you interact with them, knowing they can’t communicate with you verbally? What would the person controlling the kentuki do with free range of a stranger’s house? This is a weird, eerie novel about technology, humanity, and essentially semi-sentient Furbies. Samanta Schweblin at her finest.

Buy your copy today from The Booksmith(opens in a new tab).

The Most by Jessica Anthony (Little, Brown & Co.)

It’s November 1957, and Kathleen, a housewife living in Delaware, puts on her old red swimsuit and gets into her apartment complex’s swimming pool, where she will remain for the next eight hours and 130-odd pages. This book is a character study examining gender roles and toxic relationships, with a cameo by Sputnik 2. I read this in one sitting and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Buy your copy today from Powell’s City of Books(opens in a new tab).

Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru, trans. Nichola Smalley (Two Lines Press)

In Johannes Anyuru’s latest, Ixelles, former poet Ruth returns to her old neighborhood for work, where she’s confronted with the memories of her former boyfriend in murals, voice recordings, even bird feathers. Anyuru mixes analog and digital technologies like Ruth’s son’s handwritten dungeon manuals, a golden CD, phone videos, and futuristic music in subtle and percolating loops until the novel itself emerges as a way of memorializing and mourning the losses caused by gentrification, inherited trauma, and the quest for narrative ownership. Ixelles is sonically clear, socially prescient, and perhaps the most hopeful book I’ve read this year.

Buy your copy today from Brazos Bookstore(opens in a new tab).

Un Amor by Sara Mesa, tr. Katie Whittemore (Open Letter Books / Peirene Press)

An aspiring literary translator moves to the village of La Escapa in the “Wild West” of Spain. She doesn’t do much translating, at least of words, but she does make some fascinating decisions in other parts of life. I was totally absorbed in this story of bad weather, worse people, and romantic obsession which Maria Enriquez calls “tense and beautiful like a crouching bird.”

Buy your copy today from Lost City Books(opens in a new tab).

Woodworm by Layla Martinez, trans. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines Press)

One of my all time favorites. Woodworm is the story of a house full of ghosts and the women who can’t seem to escape it, a revenge tale full of mysticism, superstition, Catholic curses, and no shortage of righteous female rage. The story twists and turns through inherited traumas and the trappings of poverty and class division. Amidst the tangle, a granddaughter squirms to free herself from it all, ultimately arriving somewhere deeper within herself and her story.

Buy your copy today from Topos Bookstore(opens in a new tab).

Beowulf trans. Maria Dahvana Headley (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

A new translation of the classic poem highlighting the female presenses in the story, and interrogating the ultra-masculine, braggart posturing throughout. Diverting from previous translations, Headley translates the monster Grendel’s mother not as a monster herself, but as a warrior woman with beastly ferocity. Her insightful introduction puts forth a strong argument for the choice, adding a refreshing take to the classic. Headley also leans into the alliteration and assonance of the Old English, bringing much of the playful form into her translation, rendering a delicious read, lush with linguistic pleasure.

Buy your copy today from Brookline Booksmith(opens in a new tab).

Cigarettes Until Tomorrow by multiple authors and translators (Two Lines Press, Calico Series)

I knew nothing about the vibrant Romanian poetry scene until reading CIGARETTES UNTIL TOMORROW, and now I’m addicted. I’ve returned to these poems again and again for words and phrases that speak to the condition of our modern existence—how “the days / pass and one can live this way too.” A tender, brutal snapshot of contemporary everyday life, Cigarettes Until Tomorrow is not to be missed.

Buy your copy today from Literary Arts(opens in a new tab).

If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund (Verso Books)

If you’re looking for a less pretentious Annie Ernaux or wish that Rachel Cusk was more likeable, try Vigdis Hjorth. The 30-year-old protagonist of If Only, Hjorth’s fourth novel translated into English by Charlotte Barslund, leaves her marriage in pathetic pursuit of a scrawny, balding Brecht scholar. Yes, she’s a mess and more than a little unlikeable, but the ways in which Hjorth’s main characters shirk societal expectations in pursuit of creative and/or romantic passions teeter on the edge of comedy and tragedy in the most enjoyable way.

Buy your copy today from Yu & Me Books(opens in a new tab).