#paperback #shortstories #international #translation #translated #womenintranslation


Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

Stories

"Humiliation is a brilliant book that captures the volatility of misunderstandings, the moment when failures matter less than the need to share them." --Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice

The nine mesmerizing stories in Humiliation, translated from the Spanish by Man Booker International Prize finalist Megan McDowell, present us with a Chile we seldom see in fiction: port cities marked by poverty and brimming with plans of rebellion; apartment buildings populated by dominant mothers and voyeuristic neighbors; library steps that lead students to literature, but also into encounters with other arts--those of seduction, self-delusion, sabotage.

In these pages, a father walks through the scorching heat of Santiago's streets with his two daughters in tow. Jobless and ashamed, he takes them into a stranger's house, a place that will become the site of the greatest humiliation of his life. In an impoverished fishing town, four teenage boys try to allay their boredom during an endless summer by translating lyrics from the Smiths into Spanish using a stolen dictionary. Their dreams of fame and glory twist into a plan to steal musical instruments from a church, an obsession that prevents one of them from anticipating a devastating ending. Meanwhile a young woman goes home with a charismatic man after finding his daughter wandering lost in a public place. She soon discovers, like so many characters in this book, that fortuitous encounters can be deceptions in disguise.

Themes of pride, shame, and disgrace--small and large, personal and public--tie the stories in this collection together. Humiliation becomes revelation as we watch Paulina Flores's characters move from an age of innocence into a world of conflicting sensations.

Humiliation

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

South Carolina





As seen in the New York Times Book Review 

Told with gripping intensity, It Would be Night in Caracas chronicles one woman's desperate battle to survive amid the dangerous, sometimes deadly, turbulence of modern Venezuela and the lengths she must go to secure her future.

"Echoes of Borges in a novel of war-torn Venezuela . . . the writing is tense and complex . . . dynamic." -The New York Times

In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcón stands over an open grave. Alone, she buries her mother--the only family she has ever known--and worries that when night falls thieves will rob the grave. Even the dead cannot find peace here.

Adelaida had a stable childhood in a prosperous Venezuela that accepted immigrants in search of a better life, where she lived with her single-mother in a humble apartment. But now Every day she lines up for bread that will inevitably be sold out by the time she reaches the registers. Every night she tapes her windows to shut out the tear gas raining down on protesters. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida must make a series of gruesome choices in order to survive in a country disintegrating into anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But just how far is she willing to go

A bold new voice from Latin America, Karina Sainz Borgo's touching, thrilling debut is an ode to the Venezuelan people and a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble.

Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer 

It Would Be Night in Caracas ARC

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#paperback #chilean #graywolfpress #place #spanish #womenintranslation 

Virginia

A Novel

An electrifying novel about illness, displacement, and what holds us together, by the author of Seeing Red


Ella is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctoral thesis in the "country of the present" but she is from the "country of the past," a place burdened in her memory by both personal and political tragedies. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist who analyzes the bones of victims of state violence and is recovering from an explosion at a work site that almost killed him. Consumed by writer's block, Ella finds herself wishing that she would become ill, which would provide time for writing and perhaps an excuse for her lack of progress. Then she begins to experience mysterious symptoms that doctors find undiagnosable.


As Ella's anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn. Each of them has their own experience of illness and violence, and eventually the systems that both hold them together and atomize them are exposed.


Lina Meruane's Nervous System is an extraordinary clinical biography of a family, full of affection and resentment, dark humor and buried secrets, in which illness describes the traumas that can be visited not just upon the body, but on families and on the history of the countries--present and past--that we live in.

Nervous System

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York

Each disparate object described in this book--a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific--shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss.

      With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.

An Inventory of Losses

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District of Columbia

Winner of Sweden's most prestigious literary prize for young readers, Girls Lost is a thriller featuring three teenage girls: Kim, Bella, and Momo. The three occupy a challenging limbo between childhood and adulthood, made only more difficult by the steady provocation of their malicious male classmates and pubescent bodies that are changing beyond their control. They are on the precipice of a grown-up world that seems to be broken into two groups: male and female; public and private; assailant and target. Eager to escape, the girls seek refuge in Bella's greenhouse, a free zone where their imaginations run wild and their talents can flourish.

After their classmates' violations escalate, the three friends plant a strange seed in the greenhouse, and a shimmering, magical flower blossoms. Intrigued, they drink the nectar from the flower, and suddenly find themselves transformed from girls to boys until the next morning. The three return each night to drink from the flower, anxious to explore their world -- and new, older male friends -- with agency and freedom. As they fall deeper into the boys' world, they discover a new reality, one of power and violence, of gangs and drugs. When their nightly escapades turn darker, two of the teens grow wary, ready to turn back and face the reality of womanhood; but Kim is determined to see their discovery to its catastrophic, fiery end.

In this tale, the body is a battlefield, and masculinity is a drug. Brilliantly poetic and deeply poignant, this magical story was adapted into an internationally-renowned feature film exploring how we shape our identity, and how we cope with our own transformations.

Girls Lost

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#hardcover #womenintranslation #israelifiction #psychological #thriller

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

This "brilliant" novel, an Elle Magazine Best Book of the Year about "lying and the lure of fame" (Joan Siber, National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Faulkner award-winning author), reveals how one mistake can have a thousand consequences.


Nofar is an average teenage girl -- so average, in fact, that she's almost invisible. Serving customers ice cream all summer long, she is desperate for some kind of escape.

One afternoon, a terrible lie slips from her tongue. And suddenly everyone wants to talk to her: the press, her schoolmates, and even the boy upstairs. He is the only one who knows the truth, and he is demanding a price for his silence.



Then Nofar meets Raymonde, an elderly immigrant whose best friend has just died. Raymonde keeps her friend alive the only way she knows how, by inhabiting her stories. But soon, Raymonde's lies take on a life of their own.



Written with propulsive energy, dark humor, and deep insight, The Liar reveals the far-reaching consequences of even our smallest choices, and explores the hidden corners of human nature to reveal the liar, and the truth-teller, in all of us.

The Liar

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#chilean #spanish #graywolfpress #womenintranslation 

#brazilianliterature #portuguese #womenintranslation #paperback 

Marcos feels alienated from his ex-wife, from his daughter, from society; everything feels flat and fake to him. When he begins to receive letters at his new address from an anonymous troubled woman who signs off as A. and who clearly believes she is writing to the former tenant, her ex-lover, Marcos falls under the spell of the manic, hypnotic missives. The letters become a kind of exorcism as both A.'s epistolary affair and Marcos' personal life reach a crisis point. Possessed by A., he is driven to discover her true identity.

Blue Flowers

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#wit #translatedfromrussian #picador #manbookerprize #womenintranslation #modernclassic

One of Russia's most renowned literary figures and a Man Booker International Prize nominee, Ludmila Ulitskaya presents what may be her final novel. Jacob's Ladder is a family saga spanning a century of recent Russian history--and represents the summation of the author's career, devoted to sharing the absurd and tragic tales of twentieth-century life in her nation.

Jumping between the diaries and letters of Jacob Ossetsky in Kiev in the early 1900s and the experiences of his granddaughter Nora in the theatrical world of Moscow in the 1970s and beyond, Jacob's Ladder guides the reader through some of the most turbulent times in the history of Russia and Ukraine, and draws suggestive parallels between historical events of the early twentieth century and those of more recent memory.

Spanning the seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years, to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day, Jacob's Ladder is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory. With a scale worthy of Tolstoy, it asks how much control any of us have over our lives--and how much is in fact determined by history, by chance, or indeed by the genes passed down by the generations that have preceded us into the world.

Jacob's Ladder

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Indie Next Selection

"A probing, wild, and fascinating novel."--Publishers Weekly

On a flight from Berlin to Paris, a woman haunted by composer Arnold Schoenberg's self-portrait reflects on her romantic encounter with a pianist. Obsessive, darkly comic, and full of angst,Blue Self-Portrait unfolds among Berlin's cultural institutions, but is located in the mid-air flux between contrary impulses, with repetitions and variations that explore the possibilities and limitations of art, history, and connection.

Blue Self-Portrait

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#hardcover #russianliterature #womenintranslation #fiction #wit 

Colorado

"Playful and poetic . . . A foxy, original writer. Memory fuses with wonder, and wonder with worship." --The Wall Street Journal

"Marvelously vivid, perfectly tuned. . . Tolstaya is well known in Russia as a brilliant and caustic political critic, but her memories of her Soviet childhood have a tender, personal quality."  --The New York Times Book Review

"Grimly hilarious ... Everything in this generous writer's hands is vivid and alive ...Tolstaya is divinely quotable--slangy, indignant, lyrical, crude...It's all sublime...the swerve and cackle, the breeziness and dark depths...the torrents of language and the offhand perfect touch...She has been compared to Chekhov. Absurd...Tolstaya barrels by him and knocks him in the ditch." --Joy Williams, Bookforum

From one of modern Russia's finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories, her first to be translated into English in more than twenty years.

Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette break; a man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls a∂ a child glimpses heaven through a stained-glass window. With the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own, Tolstaya transmutes the quotidian into aetherial alternatives. These tales, about politics, identity, love, and loss, cut to the core of the Russian psyche, even as they lay bare human universals. Tolstaya's characters--seekers all--are daydreaming children, lonely adults, dislocated foreigners in unfamiliar lands. Whether contemplating the strategic complexities of delivering telegrams in Leningrad or the meditative melancholy of holiday aspic, vibrant inner lives and the grim elements of existence are registered in equally sharp detail in a starkly bleak but sympathetic vision of life on earth.
A unique collection from one of the first women in years to rank among Russia's most important writers.

Aetherial Worlds (Library Copy)

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For her most recent work and first novel - Notre-Dame du Nil, originally published in March 2012 with Gallimard in French - Mukasonga immerses us in a school for young girls, called Notre-Dame du Nil.' The book is a prelude to the Rwandan genocide and unfolds behind the closed doors of the school, in the interminable rainy season. Friendships, desires, hatred, political fights, incitation to racial violence, persecutions are all explored as the school becomes a fascinating existential microcosm of the true 1970s Rwanda.'

Our Lady of the Nile

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An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor.

The Forgery

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A piercing and passionate novel, set in rural Argentina, about violence and masculinity Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito’s older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers’ petty feud. The Tamai and Miranda families are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada’s fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice.

Brickmakers

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North Carolina

Set in Romania at the height of Ceauescu's reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished province for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch. All the narrator's friends--teachers and students of vaguely dissident allegiance--betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.

Herta Müller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at once harsh and poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a society and a generation ruined by fear. In simple images of hieroglyphic power--policeman filling their pockets and mouths with green plums; girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of offal; a docile proletariat making things no one wants--"tin sheep and wooden watermelons"--Müller anatomizes a country and its citizens and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.

The Land of Green Plums

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Ohio

In this prize-winning Iranian novel, a spoiled and foul-mouthed young woman looks to get high while her family and city fall to pieces.

What do you do when the world is falling apart and you're in withdrawal?

Disillusioned, wealthy, and addicted to opium, Shadi wakes up one day to apocalyptic earthquakes and a dangerously low stash. Outside, Tehran is crumbling: yuppies flee in bumper-to-bumper traffic as skaters and pretty boys rise up to claim the city as theirs. Cross-dressed to evade hijab laws, Shadi flits between her dysfunctional family and depressed friends--all in search of her next fix.

Mahsa Mohebali's groundbreaking novel about Iranian counterculture is a satirical portrait of the disaster that is contemporary life. Weaving together gritty vernacular and cinematic prose, In Case of Emergency takes a darkly humorous, scathing look at the authoritarian state, global capitalism, and the gender binary.

In Case of Emergency

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Brand new! Translated fiction! #paperback #fiction #mystery #Translated #WomenInTranslation 

Selected by NYT as one of MOST NOTABLE BOOKS of 2020.   




On a stormy summer day the Aosawas, owners of a prominent local hospital, host a large birthday party. The occasion turns into tragedy when 17 people die from cyanide in their drinks. The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer's, and the physician's bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only person spared injury. 




But the youth who emerges as the prime suspect commits suicide that October, effectively sealing his guilt while consigning his motives to mystery. The police are convinced that Hisako had a role in the crime, as are many in the town, including the author of a bestselling book about the murders written a decade after the incident, who was herself a childhood friend of Hisako' and witness to the discovery of the murders.  The truth is revealed through a skilful juggling of testimony by different voices: family members, witnesses and neighbours, police investigators and of course the mesmerizing Hisako herself.

Paulina Flores; Megan McDowell (Translator)

Humiliation

Karina Sainz Borgo; Elizabeth Bryer (Translator)

It Would Be Night in Caracas ARC

Lina Meruane; Megan McDowell (Translator)

Nervous System

Judith Schalansky; Jackie Smith (Translator)

An Inventory of Losses

Jessica Schiefauer; Saskia Vogel (Translator)

Girls Lost

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

The Liar

Lina Meruane; Megan McDowell (Translator)

Nervous System

Carola Saavedra

Blue Flowers

Lina Meruane; Megan McDowell (Translator)

Nervous System

Ludmila Ulitskaya; Polly Gannon (Translator)

Jacob's Ladder

Noemi Lefebvre; Sophie Lewis (Translator)

Blue Self-Portrait

Tatyana Tolstaya

Aetherial Worlds (Library Copy)

Scholastique Mukasonga; Melanie Mauthner (Translator)

Our Lady of the Nile

Ave Barrera

The Forgery

Selva Almada

Brickmakers

Herta Muller

The Land of Green Plums

Mahsa Mohebali; Mariam Rahmani (Translator)

In Case of Emergency

Riku Onda; Alison Watts (Translator)

The Aosawa Murders