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At the end of every episode of The Moth Radio Hour, we say, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers.” But memory is imperfect, and sometimes the way we remember events is different from how they actually unfolded. Think of Moth stories — both the ones you’ve already heard, and the ones we hope you tell one day — as an artistic time capsule of one person’s emotional experience of events...

If you (like me) aren’t a huge fan of the heat, then July is the perfect month to hunker down, turn on the fan for some good, cool air and white noise, and pull out your next great read. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the books in translation released this past month that we’re the most excited about. In this month’s selection, you’ll find a generational story about sisters that spans decades; a "a fiercely anti-sentimental meditation on the unsettling paradoxes of motherhood;" meditations on cigars and cars; a bleak, necropastoral landscape; an “anti-voyeuristic portrait of a people visited by tragedy;” a writing fellowship and a mysterious talk show; stories about coming of age and abuses of power; and a new book from "a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller."

Sad girls, weird girls, bitchy girls — they make for unreliable narrators while being painfully relatable ones. They articulate those dark, strange, emotions and thoughts that live within you; they know the shame, disgust, rage, hopelessness, sorrow, and fear that perhaps you’ve always known but never realized belonged to anyone but you. Sometimes they embrace those feelings; sometimes they rebel against them; regardless, their actions (and inaction) are often morally ambiguous. The women in these books are polarizing and often scorned for being so unkempt, for being petty, for not caring enough, or for caring too much. Why do these women provoke such strong reactions? How do we as a culture view and treat women that we see as flawed?

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I love words. English words and ones in foreign languages as well. My great regret in life is that I did not learn German and, maybe someday, I will. I study foreign languages, not to achieve fluency, but because I like thinking about the ways in which the language one speaks alters and defines one’s experience of the world. How will you experience cats if you speak a language where they are always accompanied by a masculine article? What does it mean that the Chinese character for woman is partially made up of the character for horse? When you begin learning Japanese, the first things you’ll be taught are several ways to apologize followed by several somewhat untranslatable terms of courtesy...

If you’ve ever asked a bookseller for a “happy” or “joyful” recommendation, then you’ll know what pure terror looks like. Books are so many things (thought-provoking, challenging, strange, unnerving, devastating, eye-opening, mind-shredding), but rarely are they happy, and even when they are happy, that happiness often comes with qualifications (death, disease, famine, war).

But in a world as bad-feeling as our world is right now, it feels worthwhile to find some good-feeling to put on our shelves, so I asked our booksellers for their go-to “happy” recommendations, and boy did they come through...