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I’m sad to say that this is our final list of new translated literature this year — we like to give our booksellers a little bit of a break in December, since we all need a little bit of a break — but what a year it’s been for literature in translation! And this past month was no exception.

Below, you’ll find a Korean memoir that looks at high-functioning depression and anxiety; a bilingual collection of early work from a German-speaking Jewish Romanian poet; a Hungarian short story collection “full of dark humor and sly historical allusions”; a Japanese novel about a lost dog, told through vignettes; a breath-length novel from a Hungarian master; a dystopian fable from Korea; a book about “a subversive literati clubhouse for defeated republican warriors” from a giant of Galician letters; a Swedish “coming-of-age story intertwined with gothic, feminist horror”; and a Japanese novel about the disillusionment of an obsessed fan. These books are great enough to keep you occupied through the end of the year — we’re sure of it. See you in 2023!

If you’ve ever questioned “does everyone actually feel a little bit awful all the time?” — this is the book for you. Mental health is highly personal, and even as it becomes less taboo, it's rare to see such honesty as in I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. If you’ve ever wondered what other people talk about in their therapy sessions, may I present Baek Sehee’s very own therapy session transcriptions. Following each session’s transcriptions, she reflects further in essay form. Already a bestseller in Korea, this read offers a look into life with high-functioning depression and anxiety. — Charlotte S.

How does a poet become a poet, and not something else? What revisions, and self-revisions, mark that path of becoming, fragile and often obscured as it is? These are a few of the many questions that struck me while reading Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, a new bilingual collection of Paul Celan’s early work, freshly published in paperback. This book marks the fruition of translator Pierre Joris’s fifty-years-long project of translating Celan’s corpus into English, and is as much a major contribution to our understanding of Celan’s poetic development as it is an homage to the devotional aspects of translation itself.

As a German-speaking Jewish Romanian poet who survived the Holocaust and wrote in its aftermath, Celan and his linguistically mystifying poems have always entranced me, refusing conventional interpretative methodologies and instead rewarding readers who are open to paradox, aporia, neologisms, and keeping one’s “yes and no unsplit.” The care with which Joris preserves what he calls this “ever-present ambiguity” throughout the collection is remarkable — a true master class in the intimacies/intricacies that arise in the act of translation. Such a book will certainly appeal to those interested in the minutiae of this process, as well as to anyone seeking a clearer understanding of Celan’s legacy, especially by way of his beginnings: “This / narrow, written-between-walls / impassably-true / Upward and Back / into the heartbright future.” (‘Anabasis’) — Alexa W.

This is the kind of writer I love to discover, whose work feels fresh and original, and the stories go in unexpected directions — full of dark humor and sly historical allusions that constantly wink at the reader. The tales in this volume reminded me of the best of modern/contemporary Eastern European literature, particularly Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, but also of Clarice Lispector, the great Brazilian author, at her quantal finest. Whether it's a battle reenactment at a grade school that descends into ahistorical anarchy and results in the formation of a black fox cult or a story that hinges on the intersection of sexual awakening and demon possession, you'll be amazed at the authorial gymnastics on display. Zsolt Láng has been celebrated for decades in his native Hungary, but is somehow just now being translated into English. All I can say is, at last! — Jennifer K.

This novel had me at “dog.” Short and intense, complex and lovely, heart-wrenching and heart-warming — The Boy and the Dog follows a dog who gets separated from its own after a series of natural disasters, told through the perspective of the people he meets over the course of his five-year journey. You guaranteed to love this book, even if you aren’t a dog-lover, but if you are a dog lover, you’ll love it even more. — Moses M.

Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai — recipient of, among other accolades, the International Booker Prize (2015) and the National Book Award for Translated Literature (2019) — returns to the literary fore with the breath-length A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (New Directions). Those acquainted with Krasznahorkai will recognize familiar thematic and stylistic throughlines: most immediately, the writer's nebulous (read: comma-heavy, rolling) albeit lucid prose (crafted in such a way, he says, to imitate speech); meandering paths of existential-metaphysical thought; and postmodern bent. For its part, A Mountain — which, formally speaking, unfurls in a series of flash vignettes — recounts the meditations of a traveler, the grandson of Prince Genji, wandering the grounds of a shifty Kyoto monastery (painstakingly engineered, plank by plank, by Krasznahorkai) that feels like it abides by a foreign set of physical laws. (Indeed, many characterize the writer's works this way: as inhabiting worlds that are proximate, vaguely familiar to us — yet almost imperceptibly, intriguingly, off-kilter.)

Come for the gorgeous cover art (a collision, it seems, of Soviet constructivism and — fittingly — a transitional, liminal time of day); stay for the masterful woodwork. — Annabel J.

We’re in a real renaissance of great Korean literature being translated into English. Sang Young Park has continued that trend, but opened up a window into a milieu I’ve never seen depicted before: contemporary queer life in Seoul. His book is revealing, moving, and beautiful. — Keith M.

A dystopian fable (from the author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982!), set in a housing complex where people who need to disappear from society go to hide out. Jin-kyung and her brother sought refuge in the Saha housing unit after a tragic incident in their hometown, but now her brother is missing and her search to find him will bring her up against those who run “Town,” the nearby corporation-run city-state that refuses any residents of the Saha housing unit official citizenship. It’s a complex, bleak story, but one well-worth digging into. — Kelsey F.

Terranova is a family bookstore in A Coruña, Galicia, in the far northwest corner of Spain, but not just any bookstore. It's a subversive literati clubhouse for defeated republican warriors after the fascist takeover of Spain in 1939, and it continues to buy contraband books and other media from the Americas through Argentina until the dictator's death in 1975. This wonderful novel is more than a time capsule of the region and its people's determination to survive fascism and tell the tale, it's the fascinating and complicated story of different generations of a family knit together and also divided by the tensions of living free-minded in a repressive society. I went down many rabbit holes while reading this, particularly in regards to Argentinian music of the 1970s. Manuel Rivas is a giant of Galician letters, and I feel so lucky to have Jacob Rogers' beautiful translation. Highly recommended! — Jennifer K.

Strega’s Olympic Hotel is written in the vein of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. You can’t help but feel unnerved — the beautiful, idyllic scenery is marred by an underlying current of wrongness. Nine young women arrive at the hotel, strangers to one another and yet closer than kin. In a way only women seem to know, they carve out moments of solace in quiet spaces: the herb garden, their communal sleeping quarters, shared glances in passing. Their days are spent preparing the hotel for guests that never seem to arrive. Strega is a coming-of-age story intertwined with gothic, feminist horror. The prose is spare but never lacking, immersive but not cloying. A perfect read for the winter season. — Charlotte S.

Akari may be mentally unstable, but at least she has her religious-lite obsession with her favorite J-pop idol to keep her occupied, but when that idol is caught up in an online media storm, she finds her obsession, and her mental health, threatened. This is an engaging, exciting, terrifying, fun look at fan obsession (from an author young enough to infuriate me — just slightly). A quick, great read. — Kelsey F.