Such Small Hands – Andrés Barba
SUCH SMALL HANDS is a slender book that falls into that other category: a tidily executed project, one with tremendous tonal intimacy and rhythmic language.
Eve Out of Her Ruins – Ananda Devi
I looked up from the fever dream of this Troumaron world to recognize myself in Kuala Lumpur, feeling like something is being sucked out of me.
This Blue Novel – Valerie Mejer Caso
The line “English is a language of water and good for recounting disasters” reads like meta-commentary about these translations.
Bright Magic: Stories – Alfred Döblin
The variety of Döblin’s work may have hurt his chances at posterity, but it’s this same quality that makes BRIGHT MAGIC such a joy to read.
Disorderly Families – Arlette Farge & Michel Foucault
Farge and Foucault’s presentation of their findings in the Bastille archives provides a much-needed corrective to historians’ hitherto single-scale, unidirectional perspective.
Suite for Barbara Loden – Nathalie Léger
The subdued anguish of the book resonates out from this admission, which seems central to the way violence against women is constituted: we can come to see our own bodies as not worth defending.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear – Yoko Tawada
Tawada opens a space of human-polar bear empathy and solidarity — amusing yet deeply serious.
The Mountains of Parnassus – Czeslaw Milosz
As Milosz himself notes in the introduction to the text, the form of the novel evades him; in The Mountains of Parnassus, he seeks a new form of novel.
Chronicle of the Murdered House – Lucio Cardoso
Chronicle of the Murdered House earns pride of place as a classic of world literature because it is a complete novel: fully realized characters, expressive writing, an exciting, finely plotted story, and enduring reflections on the human condition.
Powers of Darkness – Bram Stoker & Valdimar Ásmundsson
MAKT MYRKRANNA is not precisely a translation of Dracula; or at least, it’s not what could be termed a good translation of Dracula.