National Translation Month 2022 Recommended Reads
By Bookshop.org
By Bookshop.org
To celebrate National Translation Month, Bookshop.org’s own Justin Walls, a former bookseller and jury member for the Best Translated Book Award, recommends this selection of must-read new translations from across the world.
—The Bookshop.org team
Dogs of Summer
Andrea Abreu
$23.00 $21.39Andrea Abreu's whizzing bottle rocket of a debut brilliantly ignites the darkened corners of larval infatuation, lighting up the intense and elemental bonds of adolescence from the inside. Julia Sanches's translation is well-versed in the squishy, malleable language of primitive intimacy, its invented slang and private jokes, its earnest outbursts and capacity for betrayal.
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele
Olivier Guez
$19.95 $18.55This evidence-based novel draws from extant documentation on the Angel of Death's escape and exile. Guez, aided by Georgia de Chamberet's translation, makes no overt attempt to humanize Mengele, instead elaborating on the official record with a factually rigorous characterization: that of an insecure paranoiac and unrepentant monster. A bold and harrowing investigation.
Witches
Brenda Lozano
$26.00 $24.18Witches arrives in a state of conscious conversation with several contemporary writers—Selva Almada, Fernanda Melchor, and Irene Solà, to name a few—whose work presents a ferociously nuanced conception of femininity. It touches on the scourge of patriarchal violence, the weight of generational knowledge, and the inherent mysticism of the natural realm.
Telluria
Vladimir Sorokin
$18.95 $17.62Telluria resembles nothing so much as a baroque curio cabinet lined with the volatile artifacts of an alternate dimension. Across fifty shifting chapters, Vladimir Sorokin details the narcotic vicissitudes of a Eurasian landmass distorted by bleak sci-fi and folkloric fantasy, elucidating the despotic and divine alike. A transmogrified classic of factionalized political fiction, Telluria hums with obsidian energy.
Panics
Barbara Molinard
$15.95 $14.83Panics situates itself deep within a hypnagogic ravine, a murky subbasement that alternately recalls the swirling surrealism of Amparo Dávila, Silvina Ocampo, and Armonía Somers. In a translation by Emma Ramadan, Molinard's circuitous stories offer a spellbinding glimpse into anxiety and repression. An electric shock to the psyche in the form of a book.
Canción
Eduardo Halfon
$17.99 $16.73Extending a successful run of genealogy-tracing sleuth novels, Eduardo Halfon here explores the 1967 kidnapping—and eventual return—of his grandfather. Canción (translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn) is populated with academics, archivists, informants and, most enigmatically, a baby-faced butcher turned guerilla triggerman. Halfon once again displays a knack for tugging at loose threads in shadowy, complex tapestries.
Cocoon
Zhang Yueran
$19.99 $18.59Extending a successful run of genealogy-tracing sleuth novels, Eduardo Halfon here explores the 1967 kidnapping—and eventual return—of his grandfather. Canción (translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn) is populated with academics, archivists, informants and, most enigmatically, a baby-faced butcher turned guerilla triggerman. Halfon once again displays a knack for tugging at loose threads in shadowy, complex tapestries.
The Visible Unseen: Essays
Andrea Chapela
$20.00 $18.60Simmering and steeped in secrecy, Zhang Yueran's Cocoon delves into a sequestered past rife with ghostly murmurings, incendiary transgressions locked away in a vault of time and memory. Translated here by Jeremy Tiang, Cocoon's mystery is slowly unspooled over a single night, the repercussions of which will reverberate down to the long-buried bones of two inextricably linked families.