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This month, we’re so excited to feature seven recently released titles in translation. On this list, you’ll find the story of a horrifying friendship in Colombia, flash nonfiction from an Iraqi writer, a French story collection written by Marguerite Duras’ protégé, “transcendently beautiful, poignant autofiction” from Norway, an irresistibly alluring mix of autobiography and fiction from a Guatemala City-born author, an emotionally nuanced Korean novel, and a slim and startling short novel from an award-winning Franco-Korean author. Please excuse me while I hop in my car, head to the store, and buy all of these.

The title character in this masterful novel is a hilarious and charismatic teen when Eri, the narrator, first gets to know him. Toño is born to the manor in Colombia, with a restless intelligence and a tendency to dominate those around him. It's a dread fascination to read on as he bounces around the country, meeting strange characters as in a picaresque, all the while developing from a rascal into a serial killer. Toño the Infallible is the story of a horrifying friendship that alludes to the horror locked into the historical character of Colombia, where it's set, but has implications for every country in the new world that was forcibly conquered and settled, ours included. — Jennifer K.

You may have noticed, flash (non)fiction is having its moment in the sun.

For a notable example, consider Iraqi writer Diaa Jubaili's short fiction collection, No Windmills in Basra, first published in 2018, freshly rendered in English by NYU scholar Chip Rossetti.

Basra — divided into thematic sections like "Wars," "Mothers," "Women," "Children" — brings to mind something I once read of the short story: you can't always say, definitively, what a story is "about," but can feel, instinctually, that it’s about something important. Many in the collection could be categorized this way — elusive, albeit hot to the touch. Others are plain and cutting. All are parable-like: cautionary, instructive somehow.

Basra is, most memorably, an exercise in levity, weighed down by ever-encroaching darkness; the only thing keeping the stories from floating freely into the fantastic — indeed, Basra incorporates elements of Arabic folklore and Latin American magic realism — is the heaviness of the human spirit and its propensity for cruelty, violence. Almost all the stories reach back, by some avenue, to Iraq's history of near-constant military embroilment: namely, the American invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a decidedly undead conflict that all but levelled the writer’s home city of Basra, an historically important port situated at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Most of Jubaili's characters have paid tax — chiefly, human — to war; fallen soldiers tend, throughout, to become unsettled, to rise from their graves.

The tales' buoyancy reads not so much as fanciful as nonchalant, emotionally detached — a difficult, perhaps inevitable, trick when indexing the bad things that have happened to a place, a people, a person. Why, in one story, does a POW's mother ignore her beloved son's letters over the many years of his imprisonment? Because, it seems, she is illiterate. Why didn't she ask a neighbor to read them to her, to record her responses? Because any meaning was obscured, anyway, by his tears. (In this story, the son returns home after a decade in prison, mere months, he learns, after his mother’s death. He finds the letters he'd sent home, and all are illegible: rambling teardrops on paper.)

In short: read Basra for the possibilities of this vogue literary form, and weep irresolute tears. — Annabel J.

In the Marguerite Duras forward to this sharp, sly short story collection, she writes about Barbara Molinard’s process, how she would write and then instantly tear up everything she’d written, and how Duras had to beg for Molinard to not follow through with this compulsion, so she could save at least a few of her stories. (Honestly, the forward is its own novel.) This stories in this collection are strange and intoxicating. It’s often not fully clear why a character does something (compulsively tries on clothes, allows his hand to be chopped off by a pharmacist), or how the character’s muddy motivations turn into a series of surreal scenes, but that’s what makes these stories so great and wildly compelling. Panics is absurd, hilarious, and beautifully translated by Emma Ramadan. — Kelsey F.

A transcendently beautiful, poignant autofiction from Orstavik that mirrors the author's experience loving and living with her own husband as he was dying. This reader knows what it's like to care for a seriously ailing partner, and the author's meditations on her experience rang true to me and were very affirming and touching. Ti Amo is a love letter through all the complications that life throws at a partnership. It's one of my favorite books of the year. — Jennifer K.

As with his three previous books in translation, each as exquisite as the other, Eduardo Halfon offers an irresistibly alluring mix of autobiography and fiction. In his newest, Canción (translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn), the award-winning Guatemala City-born author turns his reflective gaze to the kidnapping of his grandfather in the late 1960s, entwining his narrative recollection with the experience of attending a Lebanese writers’ conference in Japan. Beyond his gorgeous prose, Halfon’s ongoing exploration of family, history, identity, legacy, and, herein, the reverberations of war and violence across generations, is utterly compelling and deeply evocative. — Jeremy G.

Concerning My Daughter is an emotionally nuanced story that deftly contemplates the societal influences that shape our lives. Hye-Jin examines the tension within relationships that arises when expectations and reality are at odds with one another. I couldn't help but be reminded of the 2022 film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, as both book and movie explore similar underlying themes and feature complicated mother-daughter relationships. Although they explore those themes in drastically different methods, a fan of one will most certainly appreciate the other. — Charlotte S.

The follow up to Dusapin’s National Book for translated literature-award-winning Winter in Sokcho, The Pachinko Parlor is slim, strong, and startling. The novel focuses on Claire on a summer visit to her grandparents in Tokyo where she takes on a temporary job tutoring a young girl in French. It’s a controlled, beautiful book about the distance between languages, cultures, and family, and how unnerving it can feel to find yourself stuck between many at once. If I’m being honest, I haven’t read Winter in Sokcho yet, but after this, it’s next on my TBR list. — Kelsey F.