It is not every season that two new translations of a major work of Western literature appear simultaneously, yet that is precisely what has occurred with the 2020 summer catalog and the publication of fresh English-language versions of the Portuguese-language original of Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908). Machado was the founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and, more importantly, is widely...

This is the second installment in WWB's new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem review translated books with a focus on the translation itself. Read more about the series in this interview with Meyer and Kareem, or have a look at the first installment in the series, Meyer's review of Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero. When discussing her latest novel, Minor Detail, Palestinian author...

An angry lone shooter wanders through the mist into town, bullets clinking. A woman sits bolt upright in the back of a taxi going the wrong way on an unlit road. A detective stumbles through the woods, dodging the searchlights of night poachers. In Ha Seong-nan’s new short story collection, Bluebeard’s First Wife, darkness and fog turn farmers’ fields and city suburbs into places of hidden horrors. These eleven stories use shock and horror to dissect contemporary...

Reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs under lockdown is a particularly strange (and estranging) experience, since so much of the novel is concerned with a heightened awareness of the decaying female body, loneliness, and the passage of time. Looking up from a page to re-immerse yourself in real time, then engaging again with the particular texture of Kawakami’s prose, her descriptions of suburban Tokyo and Osaka in which years unspool within the space of a few pages, is a...

Two men set off across Japan in search of the perfect spot to commit suicide. It’s not your traditional travel story, let alone an ideal vacation, but Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands offers an encounter between Eastern and Western literary traditions that makes for a ghostly, unsettling trip. Poschmann is a well-known figure in Germany, a respected writer whose work spans different genres (poems, short stories, essays, novels) and has been distinguished with accolades such...

Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation is a new series of reviews from Words Without Borders that seeks to provide one possible response to the habitual question, "How Should We Review Translation?" The question is trickier than it might seem on its face, for it assumes that reviewers are paying any attention to the translator at all. In recent years, progress has been made in creating greater visibility for the art of translation through campaigns like #namethetranslator; still,...

This is the first installment in WWB's new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem review translated books with a focus on the translation itself. Read more about the series in this interview with Meyer and Kareem. The Ecuadorean writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero is not a fan of the family. In each of the thirteen stories that make up her collection Cockfight, newly translated by Frances Riddle, Ampuero...

Kosef J is an inmate at an unnamed Romanian prison, where he serves his sentence for an undisclosed crime. One day, after failing to give him breakfast, and later to drag him to the fields to work with the rest of the prisoners, a guard casually mentions that as of that morning, Kosef J is free. Yet the wary inmate knows nothing of the world beyond the high prison walls, having spent the better part of his adult life behind bars. Instead of marching out the front gate, Mr. K claims he...

When it was originally released in Spanish in 2017, Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes (Hurricane Season) quickly became the Mexican novel of the year. Critics praised the book’s forceful prose and compelling narrative, noting how Melchor masterfully taps into disparate literary traditions—among them, noir detective novels and modernist psychological prose—to create something very much her own. Prior to the release of the novel, Melchor was already considered...

They led you away at dawn. So begins the section of Anna Akhmatova’s iconic poem “Requiem,” which Monika Zgustova chose as the frontispiece for this immensely powerful book about women’s experiences in the Soviet gulag. Zgustova was a teenager in the mid-1970s, when her family fled Czechoslovakia to escape political persecution from the Communist regime (her father was a prominent Czech linguist). She grew up in the US. Intensely interested in Russian literature,...

Often associated with dramatic images of war and daunting journeys undertaken amid precarious circumstances, the experience of contemporary migration and asylum-seeking gains an unexpected Beckettian tone in Two Blankets, Three Sheets, an engrossing and exasperating novel by the Iraq-born Dutch novelist Rodaan Al Galidi. The first of Al Galidi’s works to be translated into English, the book straddles the line between fiction and memoir as it draws on the author’s own experience...

Singer in the Night, by Croatian novelist, poet, and playwright Olja Savičević, may look like a conventional road-trip novel, but it is far from it. To start with, our protagonist is no existential young man but a middle-aged woman, the soap-opera writer Clementine. After an accident leaves her struggling with memory loss, she jumps into her golden Mazda convertible to look for her vanished first husband—ostensibly not for sentimental reasons but to retrieve the keys to her...

In a 2007 interview with journalist Rochelle Furstenberg, Zeruya Shalev said that her writing seeks “the opposite of the public domain. I want to capture the nuances of the inner life.” This assertion notwithstanding, her sixth novel, Pain, wades into contemporary Middle Eastern politics to establish a rather problematic comparison between the pain caused by a terrorist act and the trauma caused when naïve illusions of perfect love are destroyed. Shalev brings these two...

As I write this review, Chileans are on the streets, dealing once again with the limits and injustices of the neoliberal model, first imposed by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and currently advanced by the government of right-wing president Sebastián Piñera. As people hit the streets, fed up with decades of policies that have intensified class inequalities across the country, the fiction of Chile as a model of free-market success and democratic neoliberalism is...

To anyone who regularly gets stuck in the news cycle, The Penguin Book of Migration Literature may seem somewhat overdue. Migration issues have received an increasing amount of media coverage over the past several years, often within a context of violence and disasters, as the number of refugees and asylum seekers worldwide hit record highs. Stories of migration are usually presented using imagery meant to provoke strong, and often contradictory, emotional responses. The picture...

  In the first entry of the long, episodic essay Summer 80, Marguerite Duras asks: “And what is this concept of summer anyway?” A timely question for the arrival of a new collection of her writing—fond memories of summer with its heat and slowness and inactivity. Duras, on the other hand, comes across as a hyperactive, if not always systematic, writer throughout Me & Other Writing, a volume of her selected nonfiction works just out with the publishing project...

A dream. It’s a foggy afternoon. I am in a forest, playing a ball game with my granddad. I am three or four years old. My mom has gone somewhere and I don’t know where she is. I feel abandoned and scared. I don’t want to play the game. I can barely see through the fog anyway, so I cannot catch the ball when my granddad passes it to me. Then everything disappears and I am all alone in the forest. I don’t remember much else, I have no idea how much time has passed;...

Ours is an age when criticism often celebrates fat-free sentences, restrained ironies, and hope that’s caged in self-awareness—novels that walk before us like sunken-cheeked, unsmiling catwalk models. Huzama Habayeb’s Velvet, by contrast, is unafraid of its fullness: its gold jewelry, its fleshy abundance, its black velvet, and most of all, its melancholic and romantic lyrics, as sung by legendary Lebanese diva Fairouz. Velvet is a novel crammed with love and loss as it...

Welcome to America is a sad lament, a tale of a family in private crisis told by an eleven-year-old girl who has decided to stop talking. Reluctance to interact with other people seems to run in the family: her brother nails his bedroom door shut and urinates into bottles so that he can be undisturbed in his room, alone with his music. Their father is dead, as we soon discover, but mourning is only part of the reason for the children’s behavior. We gradually piece together a...

Wang Anyi’s novel Fu Ping is a coming-of-age tale set in the midst of the turbulent years of China’s Cultural Revolution. Its narrative arc—that of a young girl who learns to challenge convention and follow her heart—may not be wholly original, but its presentation, full of detours and side stories, makes for a memorable, smart study of the lives of ordinary people in Shanghai in the 1960s, during the second decade of Communist rule in China. Wang’s frequent...