Fiction In Translation

Translated by Chris Andrews In 1936, a young dreamer named Edmond Charlot opened a modest bookshop in Algiers. Once the heart of Algerian cultural life, where Camus launched his first book and the Free French printed propaganda during the war, Charlot's beloved bookshop has been closed for decades, living on as a government lending library. Now it is to be shuttered forever. But as a young man named Ryad empties it of its books, he begins to understand that a bookshop can be much more than ju...

Translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine. After the Sun opens portals to our ne...

Translated by Heather Cleary In a small Midwestern city, the deer population starts attacking people. So Beryl, a feisty senior and ex-hippie with a troubled past, decides to take matters into her own hands, training a squad of fellow retirees to hunt the animals down and to prove to society they’re capable of more than playing bingo. At the same time, a group of protesters decides to abandon the “system” and live in the woods, leaving behind the demands of modern life―including their childre...

Translated by Stefan Tobler Lori yearns for love yet is scared of herself, and of connecting with another human. When she meets Ulisses, a Professor of Philosophy, she is forced to confront her fears. As both of them will learn, to be worthy of another person, they must first be fully themselves. The book of which Clarice Lispector said, 'I humanized myself', An Apprenticeship is about the ultimate unknowability of the other in a relationship, and what it means to love and be loved. Paperback...

Translated by Stefan Tobler Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only "to love and to be loved," but also "to be worthy of life itself." Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is...

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude...

Translated by Kalau Almony Astral Season, Beastly Season is the debut novel by Japanese writer Tahi Saihate. The story follows Morishita and Yamashiro, two high-school boys approaching the age in life when they must choose what kind of people they want to be. When their favourite J-pop idol kills and dismembers her boyfriend, Morishita and Yamashiro unite to convince the police that their idol's act was in fact by them. This thrilling novel is a meditation on belonging, the objectification of...

Translated by Anna Moschovakis Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France's German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comra...

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter Classical guitarist Satoshi Makino has toured the world and is at the height of his career when he first lays eyes on journalist Yoko Komine. Their bond forms instantly. Upon their first meeting, after Makino's concert in Tokyo, they begin a conversation that will go on for years, with long spells of silence broken by powerful moments of connection. She's drawn by Makino's tender music and his sensitivity, and he is intrigued by Yoko's refinement and int...

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet Hailed internationally as perhaps the most important novel of the young twenty-first century, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is the culmination of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's remarkable and singular career. Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika....

This book presents 22 classic Chinese proverbs and the traditional tales behind them. The stories are bilingual, with the Chinese and English versions presented on facing pages. Each includes an explanation of how the proverb is used today, cultural notes, vocabulary and discussion questions. Audio recordings of the tales read by native speakers are included—both on the accompanying CD and as downloadable online audio—giving students a chance to improve their pronunciation and comprehension. ...

"Congratulations, you've won the lottery!" shouts the angel Prapura to a formless soul. The soul hasn't been kicked out of the cycle of rebirth just yet—he's been given a second chance. He must recall the biggest mistake of his past life while on 'homestay' in the body of fourteen-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, who has just committed suicide. It looks like Makoto doesn't have a single friend, and his family don't seem to care about him at all. But as the soul begins to live Makoto's life on his o...

Translated by Natasha Wimmer Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño’s boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In “Cowboy Graves,” Arturo Belano–Bolaño’s alter ego–returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. “French Comedy of Horrors,” takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse wher...

Translated by Anton Hur Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society. Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Paperback: 256 PagesProduct Dimensions: 1...

Helsinki, 2016. Olenka sits on a bench, watching a family play in a dog park. A stranger sits down beside her. Olenka startles; she would recognize this other woman anywhere. After all, Olenka was the one who ruined her life. And this woman may be about to do the same to Olenka. Yet, for a fragile moment, here they are, together--looking at their own children being raised by other people. Moving seamlessly between modern-day Finland and Ukraine in the early days of its post-Soviet independenc...

Translated by Julia Sanches Electrifying and provocative, visceral and profound, a powerful literary debut novel about a young woman whose compulsion to eat earth gives her visions of murdered and missing people-an imaginative synthesis of mystery and magical realism that explores the dark tragedies of ordinary lives. Set in an unnamed slum in contemporary Argentina, Eartheater is the story of a young woman who finds herself drawn to eating the earth-a compulsion that gives her visions of bro...

Translated by Sophie Hughes Daniel disappeared three months, two days and eight hours after his birthday. He was three. He was my son. Empty Houses unfolds in the aftermath of a child’s disappearance. His mother is distraught. As her life begins to unravel, she is haunted by his absence but also by her own ambivalence: did she even want him in the first place? In a working-class neighbourhood on the other side of Mexico City another woman protects her stolen child. After longing desperately t...

Translated by Zac Haluza Last week, the vigilante killer who terrified and thrilled the city of Chengdu with his 'death notices' performed his own execution to escape capture by the police. But when two students are violently murdered, the only clue left by the killer is a death notice. The executioner? Eumenides. Now Captain Pei Tao and his task force face a terrifying prospect: that Eumenides left a protege to carry on his work. Once again, Eumenides is one step ahead of their investigation...

Translated by Philip Gabriel A mindbending new collection of short stories from the beloved, internationally acclaimed, Haruki Murakami. The eight masterly stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From nostalgic memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world. Occasionally, a nar...

Translated by Roger Senhouse 'He must know by now, I should think, that I can give as good as I get!' This is the story of Gigi, educated as a future courtesan in Paris, her days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions. Bored and unconvinced by what she's taught, Gigi surprises everyone with her earnest approach to love. In this classic turn-of-the-century novella, Colette unveils Gigi's journey into womanhood in rich and supple prose. Paperback: 160 PagesProduct Dimensions: 1...

Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami's novel is told in the voice of a fourteen-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy suffers in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors. The young friends meet in secret in the hopes of avoiding any further attentio...

Translated by Bruno Navasky The streets of Tokyo swarm below fifteen year-old Copper as he gazes out into the city of his childhood. Struck by the thought of the infinite people whose lives play out alongside his own, he begins to wonder, how do you live? Considering life's biggest questions for the first time, Copper turns to his dear uncle for heart-warming wisdom. As the old man guides the boy on a journey of philosophical discovery, a timeless tale unfolds, offering a poignant reflection ...

This diverse anthology of traditional tales from across the Indonesian archipelago includes short stories, origin myths, historical legends, poetry, diary entries, news reports and dialogues. Each of the 20 stories is presented in parallel English and Indonesian versions on facing pages, making this a great resource for intermediate language learners. Although written in the Indonesian national language, the stories hail from many different ethnic cultures and include a number of female chara...

Translated by Caroline Waight Family brings the young woman back to the Faroe Islands - the windswept, rocky northern archipelago where she has never lived but which she has always called home. There she finds her stories entwining with those of her ancestors as she searches for a way to connect with the culture and her kin. Is 'home' just a place name, or something more? Split across three generations of a Faroese family, rooted in the wild beauty of the islands and the author's own history,...

Translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his race; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down s...

Translated by Janet Hong In the summer of 2002, nineteen-year-old Kim Hae-on was murdered in what became known as the High School Beauty Murder. There were two suspects: Shin Jeongjun, who had a rock-solid alibi, and Han Manu, to whom no evidence could be pinned. The case went cold. Seventeen years pass without justice, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover so...

Translated by Stephen Dodd When Hanio Yamada realises the future holds little of worth to him, he puts his life for sale in a Tokyo newspaper, thus unleashing a series of unimaginable exploits. A world of murderous mobsters, hidden cameras, a vampire woman, poisoned carrots, code-breaking, a hopeless junkie heiress and makeshift explosives reveals itself to the unwitting hero. Is there nothing he can do to stop it? Resolving to follow the orders of his would-be purchasers, he comes to underst...

Translated by Lara Vergnaud An inventive coming-of-age novel from acclaimed French novelist Joy Sorman, Life Sciences boldly investigates the female condition, bodily autonomy, and the failings of modern medicine as one young woman confronts a centuries-old, matrilineal curse. Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or ailment--one of her anc...

How can you save your friend's life if she doesn't want to be rescued? In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find the mirrors in their bedrooms are shining. At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives into to a wondrous castle filled with winding stairways, watchful portraits and twinkling chandeliers. In this new sanctuary, they are confronted with a set of clues leading to a hidden room where one of them will be granted a wish. But there's a catch: if ...

Translated by Adam Thorpe 'She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.' This is the story of Emma, trapped in a disappointing marriage with a dull country doctor, she dreams for a life more like the sentimental novels she reads. In an attempt to break from the drab reality of her provincial life in Normandy, Emma takes a lover, and disaster soon follows. Greedy, delusional and selfish, the character of Emma Bovary scandalised readers from the novel's first publication in 1857, yet her...

A shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, Monkey King is one of the most memorable superheroes in world literature. High-spirited and omni-talented, he can transform himself into whatever he chooses and turn each of his body's 84,000 hairs into an army of clones. But his penchant for mischief repeatedly gets him into trouble, and when he raids Heaven's Orchard of Immortal Peaches, the Buddha pins him beneath a mountain. Five hundred years later, Monkey King is finally gi...

Translated by Gerry Bothmer 'Knut Hamsun founded the modernist and postmodernist novel at once' writes James Wood in his introduction to this seminal work by a Nobel Prize-winning writer who has been recognised as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. A young man called John Nagel arrives to spend a summer in a small Norwegian coastal town, a stranger in a loud yellow suit who begins to behave very curiously. He shocks, bewilders and beguiles with his open defiance an...

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman Amelia was one of those people who destroyed everything and called it art. Paul is a student who works as a hotel night guard to make ends meet. Amelia, who studies at the same university, is the young woman who rents Room 313. Everything about her is a mystery: where she goes, who she meets - and where she comes from. Paul and Amelia become compulsively and inextricably entangled, until one day, Amelia disappears. Unknown to Paul, she has gone to Sarajevo in s...

Translated by Tina Kover Josephine teaches in a high school in a suburb of Paris. Her life is a balancing act between Xanax and Tupperware lunches in the staff room until she walks into a Champs-Elysee's strip club. There she learns a secret nocturnal code of conduct; she discovers camaraderie and the joys of female company, and she thrills at the sensation of men's desire directed toward her. Josephine, a teacher by day, begins to lead a secret existence by night that ultimately allows her t...

Translated by Julian Semilian A dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the dark world of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child messiah works his magic in the tenements, a young man explores gender boundaries, a woman relives her youth and an architect becomes obsessed with the sound of his new car horn - with unexpected consequences. Blending reality and symbolism, time and myth, t...

Translated by Melanie Mauthner Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be moulded into respectable citizens. In the elite school run by white nuns, the young ladies learn, eat, sleep and gossip together. Fifteen years prior to the Rwandan genocide, the girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes. Everything unfolds behind the doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, and persecution. Paperback: 224 PagesProduct Dimensions: 140 x 200 mmISBN: 9781911...

Translated by Patrick Creagh In the sweltering summer of 1938, with Lisbon in the grip of Portugal's dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, a journalist is coming to terms with the rise of fascism around him and its insidious impact on his work. Consumed by the passing of his wife and the child he never had, Pereira lives a quiet and lonely existence. One day, the young and charismatic Monteiro Rossi enters his life, changing everything. A man who once shied away from criticizing Portugal's authori...

Long-awaited by teachers and students, Read Real Japanese: Fiction presents short works by six of today’s most daring and provocative Japanese writers. The spellbinding world of Hiromi Kawakami; the hair-raising horror of Otsuichi; the haunting, poignant prose of Banana Yoshimoto; even the poetic word-play of Yoko Tawada – whatever their tastes, readers are sure to find something of interest and value in this book, suitable for students at the intermediate level and above. As in real Japanese...

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa In the city of Lisbon, Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. Misunderstanding twelve to mean noon as opposed to midnight, he is left to wait. As the day unfolds he has many unexpected encounters - with a young drug addict, a disorientated taxi driver, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel and the ghost of the late great poet Fernando Pessoa - each meeting travelling between the real and illusionary. Part tr...

Illustrated by JOK It was the Ice and Snow Arts Festival that lured the low-temperature artist to Earth. Drawn by the beauty and technical skill of the sculptures displayed, the extraterrestrial visitor longed to collaborate and share its own art. But while humans learnt to craft ice into exquisite ephemera, the low-temperature artist's civilisation mastered the manipulation of whole worlds to create artworks – drawing on the seas and ice caps, and cooling their temperature to beautiful effec...

Translated by Sung Ryu "For her endless interest in and advice for me, I was grateful as I was increasingly resentful. I felt that she was trampling on the boundaries of “me,” rudely trespassing on the space that was “me.” She was far away yet much too close to me. I couldn’t stand her love, which did not reject even the ugliest of my faces. I couldn’t stand it because I had been afraid of being loved from the beginning." In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits...

Translated by Polly Barton Searingly honest and sexually explicit, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex in a comics market. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager e...

Translated by Jeremy Tiang In the fictional Chinese city of Yong'an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness--save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self. Part detecti...

This book introduces 40 stories from the Philippines through bilingual Tagalog and English texts presented on facing pages. Paired with cultural notes, vocabulary lists, exercises, comprehension questions and free online audio recordings, Tagalog Stories for Language Learners is an excellent resource for intermediate language learners. This compilation includes a mix of traditional folktales retold for a modern audience, as well as several well-known works of contemporary Philippine literatur...

Translated by Anna Kushner In a neighbourhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighbourhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral. Told by a chorus of narrators - including gossips, gangsters, a ghost, and a serial killer - who flirt, lie, a...