Fiction In Translation - Staff Picks
Fiction In Translation - Staff Picks
By Malvern Books
Our favorite novels and short story collections in translation.
The Factory
Hiroko Oyamada
$13.95 $12.97Celia says, "I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it. A lot of works that engage with the senselessness of life ask their readers to experience anguish or the shock of finding meaninglessness where you expected to find meaning. Oyamada asks you to live with the flatness of her characters, the ways in which their lives are hollowed out without their own awareness."
One Hundred Twenty-One Days
Michèle Audin
$14.95 $13.90Schandra says, "A book for lovers of mathematics, French literature, history, genealogy, mystery, and poetry. If you found beauty in Anne Frank’s diary or in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 'All the Lights We Cannot See,' you will most certainly find it here."
The Musical Brain: And Other Stories
César Aira
$29.95 $27.85Claire says, "My first foray into the wild mechanics of Aira’s fiction, this collection of short stories feels like it has been spun out of the webby brainwaves of a mad scientist. Aira is known as the Latin American master of microfiction, having published ten short novels in nine years with New Directions. His genius is beyond question, though its expression is so strange, that after reading any one of these stories, your brain may be full of nothing but questions, but also delight."
Harbart
Nabarun Bhattacharya
$13.95 $12.97Celia says, "Harbart is a phantasmagoric novel in which the messages the dead leave are lost, misinterpreted, and outright ignored. Realism, says Bhattacharya, is insufficient for a world in which the past is so evidently not finished with us."
Hashish
Oscar Schmitz and Alfred Kubin
$15.95 $14.83Rebekah says, "It has been a long time since a book has shocked and morbidly fascinated me as much as Hashish by Oscar A.H. Schmitz. Literary dandy Schmitz was held in high esteem by his contemporaries, but other decadent and fin de siècle writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde have eclipsed his presence in modern mainstream consciousness. Thanks to Wakefield Press, however, this practically unknown collection of German tales has finally come out of the woodwork, available in English for the first time since its original 1902 publication. "
Toddler Hunting: And Other Stories
Taeko Kono
$18.95 $17.62Celia says, "These are vivid, sad, violent stories about being trapped in a senseless world. Her narrators are women, mostly, unhappy in the sphere of marriage, motherhood and domesticity, fearlessly or timidly seeking out the externalization of suffering through masochism or humiliation or flirting with death. And yet these aren’t entirely nihilistic stories either."
Flights: Nobel Prize and Booker Prize Winner
Olga Tokarczuk
$18.00 $16.74Celia says, "'Flights' is a network of neurons, a fragile map that might not be immediately recognizable as a system, but which is constantly transmitting impulses, stories, quick bursts of scenes. It claims to be about travel and the body, but a better description might be: what does a body look like in movement? What are its transitions, the way it’s constantly disintegrating and being born?"
The Governesses
Anne Serre
$12.95 $12.04Celia says, "'The Governesses' could as easily be a Victorian experiment by the likes of Christina Rossetti, or a novel written just this year, and still on the cutting edge. It’s difficult to picture Serre writing it, in the same way that it’s difficult to picture the craftsmanship of a Fabergé egg, that perfect, jewel-encrusted world unto itself. And yet this is a novel that asks its reader to think deeply about the act of creation, and about the nature of the created world."
The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector
$15.95 $14.83Tracey says, "Perhaps the most Kafkaesque of Lispector’s nine novels—yes, it involves a cockroach—is the mystical 'The Passion According to G.H.,' first published in 1964 as 'A Paixão Segundo G.H.,' and released in a superb translation by Idra Novey by New Directions in 2012."
Amulet
Roberto Bolaño
$16.95 $15.76F says, "Perhaps it’s too easy to recommend a book by Bolaño, but this is the first novel by him I ever read. I bought it on a whim around 2007ish, after having witnessed his corner of the shelf at the local bookstore get a little bigger year after year. Finally I said, Who is this guy?, and picked one up. I will say now, after ten years of distance, that nothing could have prepared me at that time for 'Amulet.' This is a story about immigrants, about the government doing the unthinkable, and about resistance. At the time a novel like this was not easy to come by, especially one that was contemporary. It is narrated throughout the course of twelve days by an older Uruguayan woman as she hides in a bathroom stall while the army invades the university in Mexico City. She calls herself the mother of all poets and passionately recounts her life, passions, fantasies, and fears. Though his longer, imperfect novels are certainly works of art in their own right, I really enjoy the impact and immediacy of shorter ones like 'Amulet.'"
The Emissary
Yoko Tawada
$14.95 $13.90Claire says, "This dystopian fable has it all: spry octogenarians, dissociative trances, and diseased young children whose odd wisdom might be the saving grace of a world so far gone, it almost resembles our own."
The Hospital
Ahmed Bouanani
$14.95 $13.90Celia says, "There are books that you’ve never heard of before that, nevertheless, cast a spell of mystery over you once you’ve picked them up, and 'The Hospital' was one of these for me. As soon as I’d finished reading, I wanted to know who Ahmed Bouanani was and why I hadn’t heard of him before. While 'The Hospital' itself is a slim book, it feels as if it reaches out to the hidden network of a life’s work, as vivid and arresting as a long still shot at the beginning of a film."
Space Invaders
Nona Fernández
$15.00 $13.95F says, "A short Chilean novel about coming of age during political turmoil and the rise of video games, that's possible to read in one sitting."
Dinner
César Aira
$13.95 $12.97Schandra says, "This book’s as much a zombie thriller for the literary fiction enthusiast as it is a piece of literary fiction for the horror enthusiast. Aira wields contemporary pop culture without cutting away the necessary characteristic of great literature: timelessness."
The Seven Madmen
Roberto Arlt
$18.95 $17.62F says, "Published in 1929, this book subtly and not-so-subtly foreshadows: World War II, South American coups d’état, comic book super-villains, the Cold War, the depiction of street life by Cortazar, Bolaño, Bukowski, the films of Godard, the plays of Tennessee Williams, the proliferation of drug/human trafficking, Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, etc. Back in print just in time for an election year. Enjoy, America."
