Translated Books We’ll Be Reading This Summer
The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories(opens in a new tab) by Osama Alomar, translated from Arabic by Osama Alomar and C.J. Collins
Personified animals (snakes, wolves, sheep), natural things (a swamp, a lake, a rainbow, trees), mankind’s creations (trucks, swords, zeroes) are all characters in The Teeth of the Comb. They aspire, they plot, they hope, they destroy, they fail, they love. These wonderful small stories animate new realities and make us see our reality anew. Reading Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories, the reader always sits up a little straighter, and a little wiser.
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington(opens in a new tab) by Leonora Carrington
Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), The Complete Stories captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist’s life.
The Manhattan Project(opens in a new tab) by Lázló Krasznahorkai, translated from Hungarian by John Batki
This work emerged from Krasznahorkai’s research on Herman Melville. As Krasznahorkai goes in search of Melville, we journey along with him on the quest for the secret of creativity. The Manhattan Project provides a rare understanding of great literature in the making.
Antígona González(opens in a new tab) by Sara Uribe, translated from Spanish by John Pluecker
Antígona González is the story of the search for a body, a specific body, one of the thousands of bodies lost in the war against drug trafficking that began more than a decade ago in Mexico. A woman, Antígona González, attempts to narrate the disappearance of Tadeo, her elder brother. She searches for her brother among the dead. But Sara Uribe’s book is also a palimpsest that rewrites and cowrites the juxtapositions and interweavings of all the other Antigones.
Family Lexicon(opens in a new tab) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee
Natalia Ginzburg’s novel is about an Italian family, the Levis. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives. Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true.
Hackers(opens in a new tab) by Aase Berg, translated from Swedish by Johannes Göransson
Swedish writer Aase Berg’s seventh book of poetry is a furious, feminist book about wanting to “hack” the patriarchal system—both in the physically violent sense and in the sense of computer hacking. But Berg also reveals the ‘hag’ behind the ‘hack,’ channeling the non-compliant rage of Glenn-Close-as-bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction. The world Berg “hags” back at is a world of sexist, capitalist, environmental, globalized violence.
Not One Day(opens in a new tab) by Anne Garréta, translated from French by Emma Ramadan
Not One Day, winner of the prestigious Prix Médicis, begins with the maxim: “Not one day without a woman.” What follows is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta’s intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter collection of memories, written under strict constraints, with each chapter written each day describing a past lover or love, exploring the interaction between memory, fantasy, and desire.
Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems(opens in a new tab) by Hirato Renkichi, translated from Japanese by Sho Sugita
Once called “the Marinetti of Japan” by David Burliuk, Hirato Renkichi produced a unique brand of Futurism from the late 1910s and early 1920s through poetry, criticism, and guerrilla performance. Contributing to the earliest productions of Japanese avant-garde poetry, his aggressive experimentation with speed, spatialization, and performability would later influence what became a lively community of Dadaist and Surrealist writers in pre-war Japan. Spiral Staircase is the first definitive volume of Renkichi’s poems to appear in English.
I Am the Brother of XX(opens in a new tab) by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from Italian by Gini Alhadeff (July 25)
Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which brews up a haunting paradox: despite a zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is intensely moving. Here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX —whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses, thirteenth-century visionaries or tormented siblings raised in elite Swiss boarding schools—Jaeggy contrives to somehow stealthily possess your mind.
Before Lyricism(opens in a new tab) by Eleni Vakalo, translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich (August 1)
Before Lyricism includes six book-length poems by renowned Greek poet and art critic EleniVakalo. By bringing these poems together under a single cover, Before Lyricism allows us to see the complex web of intertextual relations that bind these books together.
The Seventh Function of Language(opens in a new tab) by Laurent Binet, translated from French by Sam Taylor (August 1)
In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva―as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.”
Autumn(opens in a new tab) by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey, illustrated by Vanessa Baird (August 22)
Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerizing intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars.
