In Translation

Stories originally written in other languages, translated into English. Read these and understand the world a little bit better!

Updated May 28, 2024
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Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter
Vargas Llosa, Mario
Paper Book
Reality merges with fantasy in this hilarious comic novel about the world of radio soap operas and the pitfalls of forbidden passion by the bestselling author of The Storyteller. Sexy, sophisticated, older Aunt Julia, now divorced, seeks a new mate who can support her in high style. She finds...
Beauty is a wound
Kurniawan, Eka
Paper Book
The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan...
Black Moses
Mabanckou, Alain
Paper Book
The "heart-breaking" (New York Times Book Review), rollicking, award-winning novel that has been described as "Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa" (Les Inrockuptibles) "One of the most compelling books you'll read in any language this year." --Rolling Stone Winner of the Hurston-Wright...
Daughter of fortune a novel
Allende, Isabel.
Paper Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits, Isabelle Allende, comes a passionate tale of one young woman's quest to save her lover set against the chaos of the 1849 California Gold Rush.   Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the...
Dead souls
Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich
Paper Book
Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily...
Dissolving classroom
Itō, Junji
Paper Book
A pair of twisted siblings-Yuuma, a young man obsessed with the devil, and Chizumi, the worst little sister in recorded history-cause all sorts of tragic and terrifying things to happen wherever they go. These scary short stories will shock you with a literal interpretation of the ills that plague...
Drive your plow over the bones of the dead
Tokarczuk, Olga
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century "A brilliant literary murder mystery." --Chicago Tribune "Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing...
The emissary
Tawada, Yōko
Paper Book
Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day...
The enlightenment of the greengage tree
Azar, Shokoofeh
Paper Book
LONGLISTED for the 2021 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE LONGLISTED for the 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature FINALIST for the 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE From the pen of one of Iran's rising literary stars, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is a family story...
Go, went, gone
Erpenbeck, Jenny
Paper Book
Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, "one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation" (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a...
My brilliant friend. Book one, Childhood, adolescence
Ferrante, Elena
Paper Book
#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY - NEW YORK TIMES Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times-bestselling "enduring masterpiece" about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic). Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the...
No longer human
Dazai, Osamu
Paper Book
Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings....
Norwegian wood
Murakami, Haruki
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, "a masterly novel" (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man's hopeless and heroic first love. ...
Pedro Páramo
Rulfo, Juan.
Paper Book
Red sorghum : a novel of China
Mo, Yan
Paper Book
The acclaimed novel of love and resistance during late 1930s China by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape...
Season of migration to the north
Ṣāliḥ, al-Ṭayyib.
Paper Book
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar...
Signs preceding the end of the world
Herrera, Yuri
Paper Book
From the author of "A Silent Fury," available Summer 2020. Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and...
Snow
Pamuk, Orhan
Paper Book
From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red (“a sumptuous thriller”–John Updike; “chockful of sublimity and sin”–New York Times Book Review), comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote...

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