Lists
by Powell's Staff, August 30, 2022 9:38 AM
We know why you’re here. The heat has been too much lately; you’re too busy keeping your fans and air conditioners trained on you to have time to choose which book to pick up next. Well, don’t fear. We’ve got you covered, with a great round-up of some of the most exciting new literature in translation. On this month’s list of new releases, you’ll find a Bride-of-Frankenstein-meets-Stepford-Wives story from Italy; a French memoir about mental health struggles and yoga and meditation; a wartime novel from a Belgium-born Russian revolutionary Marxist; a Japanese novel about emotional labor and a maybe pregnancy; a story about the “true nature of sisterhood across class and gender assignment” from a Mexican novelist; two novels from Spain: one, a gross and gritty portrayal of friendship, and the other where “all sorts of lines are thin (or pretend-thin);” and a book from a Korean author, who wrote a “funhouse-mirror-turned-character-study masquerading as a true crime thriller.” Any of these would be perfect company for these final hazy days of summer.
The Performance
by Claudia Petrucci (tr. Anne Milano Appel)
Translated from the Italian
In this breathlessly fascinating psychological thriller (already optioned for movies and tv), Giorgia has given up a promising career in theater for a stable, if tedious, relationship and new job. When she runs across her old theater director, a charming, devious character, she can't resist going back on the stage. Now her boyfriend and her director are vying to control her, all the while justifying their own actions, in this Bride-of-Frankenstein-meets-Stepford-Wives story about the roles that men try to impose on women in a patriarchal society. Are all relationships really play-acting, in some sense? If this is a debut, I can't wait to read what Claudia Petrucci comes up with next! — Jennifer K.
Yoga
by Emmanuel Carrère (tr. John Lambert)
Translated from the French
What begins as the story of Carrère's interest in yoga and his time at a meditation retreat ultimately becomes a memoir of mental health struggle. Many of the sections in this book feel like prose poems or journal entries, and the story here happens before you're entirely aware of it. Although I am very different from Carrère in many ways, I found many aspects of this deeply relatable: the urge to constantly improve myself, the pressure to create things. Although not necessarily meant to be a statement on the pressures of modern life, Carrère speaks to these things with eloquence and humor. I found myself noting passages so I could return to them again and again. — Alice H.
Dogs of Summer
by Andrea Abreu (tr. Julia Sanches)
Translated from the Spanish
For a debut novel, Dogs of Summer sure knows exactly what it is. Reviews have compared the book to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, which I can see — an intimate, complex friendship between two young girls is at the center of it, a relationship they negotiate alongside the realities of their changing bodies and the harsh world around them — but Andrea Abreu is much grittier and (honestly!) much grosser than Ferrante. For one, our narrator is affectionately named “Shit” by best friend Isora. There is grinding and barbies kissing and fleas infesting the "minkies." This book is so fun, intoxicating, and close (sometimes uncomfortably so!!) to the girls and their journeys. It’s brutal; it’s perfect; I loved Dogs of Summer. — Kelsey F.
Songs for the Flames
by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (tr. Anne McLean)
Translated from the Spanish
This new story collection from the renowned Colombian writer, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, which often borders on autofiction, digs into his country’s troubled past through all the different forms words can take: grammar books and literature, secrets and music, oral histories and handwritten letters and social media. The characters’ lives are all touched by violence, but their complex worlds are handled deftly and with nuance by Vasquez. This next statement may be a big statement, but I stand by it: Songs for Flames earns its Borges epigraph. — Kelsey F.
Last Times
by Victor Serge (tr. Ralph Manheim)
Translated from the French
Belgium-born Russian revolutionary Marxist Victor Serge was an accomplished author of novels, poems, memoir, essays, and historical nonfiction. Last Times (translated by Ralph Manheim, for whom the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation was named) is set during the Nazi invasion of France (Serge himself was in Paris in June 1940) and follows a group of anti-fascists as they flee the city for Marseilles. Written in the early 40s after Serge escaped to America, this new edition is the first full translation of Serge’s wartime novel. — Jeremy G.
Diary of a Void
by Emi Yagi (tr. David Boyd & Lucy North)
Translated from the Japanese
Every woman has those moments where they wonder, what would happen if I simply stopped doing the invisible, emotional labor that everyone automatically tasks me with? Is that even possible without facing retaliation? In Diary of a Void, Shibata is pregnant — sort of. In one spur-of-the-moment decision, she announces that she's pregnant and can no longer prepare and serve coffee to the office or clean up the meeting rooms since the smell of coffee and cigarettes aggravates her morning sickness. This announcement swiftly changes her life. Her job duties don't change, but all the unspoken expectations do. Shibata leaves work at a reasonable hour (5 p.m.); she cooks healthy, homemade meals; she starts exercising; she even takes maternity leave, all in preparation for her baby.
Yagi does a fantastic job creating an absurd situation that feels all too plausible, letting the reader in the on the secret while simultaneously leaving them in the dark. As we follow Shibata on her journey, we're with her for every hormone shift, weight fluctuation, mommy aerobics class, and doctor's visit... all of which blur our perception of Shibata's reality. Diary of a Void is a wonderfully biting commentary on the lengths women have to go to justify caring for themselves, not just caring for others. — Charlotte S.
Wake Me Up at 9 in the Morning
by A Yi (tr. Nicky Harman)
Translated from the Chinese
I’m a sucker for a mystery; I’m a sucker for lit in translation. So, a mystery in translation? Sign. Me. Up. This Chinese novel is filled with characters you wouldn’t mind seeing dead, alibis and motives and secrets and consequences. It’s juicy, but the kind of juice that’s spiked — delicious, deadly. This one is fun. — Kelsey F.
Witches
by Brenda Lozano (tr. Heather Cleary)
Translated from the Spanish
I can't say enough about this profound, transcendent novel of sisterhood by Brenda Lozano (author of the critically acclaimed Loop), beautifully translated by Heather Cleary. A journalist from Mexico City is assigned a story in the mountains of Oaxaca and goes to interview a shaman/healer/witch there. As the two women share stories of their lives, they find that they have a lot in common, despite seemingly great differences of background, and this raises some questions. When is a woman a witch? And when is a man really a muxe (third gender in indigenous Zapotec societies)? This is a book to read and reread for its lovely prose and the profound insights it offers about the true nature of sisterhood across class and gender assignment. — Jennifer K.
Lemon
by Kwon Yeo-sun (tr. Janet Hong)
Translated from the Korean
Perhaps mirroring its sensuous title, Lemon is a short novel of delicious contradictions, in which pleasure and discomfort, sweetness and bitterness, life cycles and death cycles jostle in a strange swirl. Kwon Yeo-sun, a celebrated writer in Korea, is known for her urgent social critiques of Korean society, especially along the lines of class and gender, and Lemon’s fable-esque tale — translated with a spare, poetic elegance by Janet Hong — sets a self-critiquing gaze on endemic violence against women and other marginalized groups. The story itself ripples out from the murder of a young girl named Hae-on, an event that will be inscribed into the cultural memory as The High School Beauty Murder — and, from here, braids the perspectives of three women who are haunted by this brutal act. What unfolds is difficult to describe — something like a funhouse-mirror-turned-character-study masquerading as a true crime thriller might be close. Yet what I found most compelling about this book is precisely this slipperiness of definition, in which resistance to the easy consumption of senseless violence, is, I think, the point. — Alexa W.
Let No One Sleep
by Juan José Millás (tr. Thomas Bunstead)
Translated from the Spanish
In Juan José Millás’s world, the line between eccentricity and menace is always hard to find. In Let No One Sleep, his newly-translated, unsettling, and masterful novel, all sorts of lines are thin (or pretend-thin). Distinctions between art and reality, truth and pretense, friend and foe all blur as the story builds to a true, powerful crescendo. — Keith M.
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Looking for more works in translation to get into? Check out our June and July lists!
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