Book Club: Women in Translation Season 2
By Idlewild Books
By Idlewild Books
Join us in 2021 for Season 2 of our Women in Translation Book Club featuring works written by women around the world, translated into English, and discussed by us! Make friends, read widely. All are welcome! As long as the store is closed, we will meet on Zoom every other Sunday at 4pm ET. When we reopen, this time might change! Email facilitator Natasha at natasha at idlewildbooks dot com for Zoom links.
Eeg
Dasa Drndic
$19.95 $18.55Meeting: February 7, 2021 Winner of the 2020 Best Translated Book Award "History remembers the names of the perpetrators, not the victims - [the protagonist] remembers and honors the lost. He travels from Rijeka to Zagreb, from Belgrade to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian castles. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the CIA and died peacefully in their beds..." -from the publisher
The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa
$17.00 $15.81Meeting: April 4, 2021 2019 National Book Award finalist, long listed for both the 2020 International Booker and Best Translated Book Award, one of the NYT's 100 Notable Books of the Year. A surveillance state starts disappearing objects, then memories, then people, in this "surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss." -from the publisher
Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor
$16.95 $15.76Meeting: June 6, 2021 Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes A linguistically dazzling investigation of a femicide in Mexico, “Melchor dares her reader to peer right into the story’s roiling heart as she peels back village lusts and jealousies layer by layer, excavating a monstrous turbulence dwelling beneath, grotesque and darkly beguiling.” -Alexandra Kleeman
Sphinx
Anne Garréta
$14.95 $13.90Meeting: August 1, 2021 "A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, "I," and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language." -from the publisher
Beyond Babylon
Igiaba Scego
$22.95 $21.34Meeting: October 3, 2021 "United by the Italian government's attempts to establish authoritarian politics in Somalia, Argentina, and at home, Scego's kaleidoscopic plot investigates deep questions about our complicity in the governments that we often feel powerless to affect." -from the publisher
Frontier
Can Xue
$16.95 $15.76Meeting:December 5, 2021 A cult figure of contemporary Chinese fiction, Xue won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award. "Exploring life in this city (or in the frontier) through the viewpoint of a dozen different characters, some simple, some profound, Can Xue's latest novel attempts to unify the grand opposites of life — barbarism and civilization, the spiritual and the material, the mundane and the sublime, beauty and death, Eastern and Western cultures." -from the publisher