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August is Women in Translation Month, which is our favorite excuse to celebrate some of our favorite women translators. This list of women-written, women-translated titles is by no means exhaustive (there needs to be a Women in Translation Year!), but we can guarantee all these titles are stunners.

Happy reading!

I know that this book, by the Ecuadorean author Mónica Ojeda, is going to be in my top 10 reads of this year. Easy. It’s so much fun, so strange, and so deftly translated by Booker. Jawbone manages to weave together stories about toxic but fulfilling friendships, vampiric relationships with mothers, references to Twilight and Moby-Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, fixations on creepypastas, and self-fulfilling prophecies. I read this one so slowly, because I wanted to savor it, and I’ve missed it since finishing.

I loved Rivera Garza’s previous book, The Taiga Syndrome, so when I saw she had a new collection coming out from Dorothy Project (a publisher I adore!), I was rabid for it, and for good reason. The collection pulls together Rivera Garza’s work over a span of 30 years, and includes stories that are eerily strange and beguiling. To self-plagiarize myself: reading this book “is a bit how I imagine being hypnotized would feel.”

This collection was translated by Sarah Booker, but includes additional translations by Lisa Dillman, Francisca González Arias, and Alex Ross.

Lloyd-Jones has described Tokarczuk “as the Stanley Kubrick of fiction, a writer who thrives on the challenge of adopting a new form for every novel” and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead serves as an exemplification of that. A fable wrapped up in a mystery, the book centers on an isolated woman who spends her time reading William Blake, doing astrology readings, and fostering a theory that the recent spate of murders is actually animals enacting revenge against hunters. A lyrical, haunting novel, all the better for Lloyd-Jones’s translation.

Oh, how I adore this book. I loved Fever Dream. I loved Mouthful of Birds. But I adored Little Eyes. A canny, creepy novel about small, mechanical creatures (I kept thinking about Furbys while I was reading, but that’s probably not exactly right) that connect those who own them and those who control them across continents. The book is one of those books that pretends to be more speculative than it is — we actually seem pretty unsettlingly close to this reality — but the way it looks at humanity and loneliness, as well as our search for connection and joy, is what really makes this book stand out. I’m already eager to reread it.

I’m a sucker for any story collection that either a) is compared to Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, or b) has ghosts in it. This collection checks off both of those boxes. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is as literary horror as literary horror can get — filled with stories about death and sex, ghosts and magic tricks, lonely women and lonely men, all laced with the very-real horror of political threats. There are so many words that I could use to describe this collection (spooky, unnerving, eerie, etc.), but I think the best thing I can really say about it is: read it.

Set inside a gated community, Paradais follows two teen boys and the crimes they commit. The book can often be a lot to stomach — often violent with language that can knot and clump on top of itself and tension that will leave your teeth clenched — but the prose (beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes) is always vital and sharp. One of the more exacting portrayals of just how horrific it can be to exist as a human in this world, Paradais is a worthy follow-up to Hurricane Season. I’ll just stay over here, hoping for a third Melchor translation from Hughes.

Sphinx is a genderless, Oulipean love story, originally published in France in 1986. The basic construct of it — two people meet; they fall in love; they fall apart — is anything but basic when rendered in a story that consistently deflects your expectations, a trick that Ramadan contends with masterfully in her translation. In her translator’s note, Ramadan asks: “how can stepping into a universe where a relationship can be described without using gender markers expand our ways of thinking about love, desire, relationships?” How, indeed! Sphinx is daring, fun, challenging, and well worth reading.

If Graywolf Publishing told me to jump, I’d ask how high, so when they lead with a novel like When I Sing, Mountains Dance, I know it’s a title I need to pay attention to. Solà’s novel weaves together stories about family, the world around us, the stories we tell about family and the world around us, as well as mythology, geology, and folklore. The book is polyphonic, with chapters told from the perspectives of deer, mushrooms, water sprites, and the earth, as well as the people who populate the world (to name only a few). A richly urgent, deeply textured, beautifully written and translated novel.

I have been a Luiselli devotee ever since reading Faces in the Crowd. Her 2015 novel, The Story of My Teeth, is so many things rolled into one: a treatise on art and philosophy and literature; a charming, multi-disciplinary, intensely intelligent book, told as Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez auctions off his teeth, telling increasingly absurd backstories for each (purportedly, among other stories, some of the teeth belonged to Borges! Woolf! Marilyn Monroe!). MacSweeney and Valeria Luiselli have a collaborative, multi-platform, multi-form partnership (via Skype, music, video tours, timelines, etc.) that I’ve loved reading and reading about over the years. I can’t wait for their next collaboration to come out.

Linea Nigra joins the ranks of recent nonfiction and autofiction about the horror and liminality of becoming a mother (see also: Rivka Galchen, Meaghan O’Connell). In this lyrical, book-length essay about “pregnancy and earthquakes,” Jazmin Barrera writes about her body changing, the expectation that a woman’s literary career will end with childbirth, her own evolving relationship with her craft, and many other discursions and digressions that all adhere to the spine of Linea Nigra: a story that embraces the expectant and the mysterious.

I remember reading Sara Mesa’s Four by Four in one big, uninterrupted gulp, so moved and compelled and unnerved by the way the story wrapped its vice grip around my lungs. Her newest book, Bad Handwriting, a collection of short stories, is just as precise, angry, and beautiful. Her work somehow manages to go both micro and macro, intimate and vast, disturbing and lovely. In an interview Mesa did, she said: "There is subversion in...compassion, starting from the moment compassion is directed at people who don’t normally receive it." An idea that holds true throughout this new, incredible story collection.

Come for the beautiful cover, stay for the exacting, sharp book by Basque author Katixa Agirre. A new mother is haunted by another mother’s infanticide; she looks at other bad mothers, at her own compulsions, at society’s prejudices and cruelties. It feels like we’ve seen plenty of bad mothers in books recently (see: Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter), and Mothers Don’t is a worthy addition to the canon of mothers who overthink, overfeel, overconsume. Katie Whittemore’s translation nails Agirre’s disturbing, introspective novel.