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...
Dead souls
Gogolʹ, Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich
Paper Book
'Rus! Russ!...Everything within you is open, desolate, and flat; your squat towns barely protrude above the level of your wide plains, marking them like little dots, like specks; here is nothing to entice and fascinate the onlooker's gaze. Yet whence this unfathomable, uncanny force that draws me to...
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...
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
A modern masterpiece from one of Italy¿s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante¿s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and...
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...
Pedro Páramo
Rulfo, Juan.
Paper Book
Winner, Fred Whitehead Award for the Best Design of a Trade Book from Texas Institute of Letters Western Books Exhibition Selection, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2003 Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted...
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
"A beautifully constructed novel by an author whose reputation in Arabic is deservedly vast."--London Tribune "An Arabian Nights in reverse, enclosing a pithy moral about international misconceptions and delusions."--The Observer Salih's shocking and beautiful novel reveals much...
Signs preceding the end of the world
Herrera, Yuri
Paper Book
A gripping reflection of life on the border between the United States and Mexico, this novel combines contemporary sensibilities with pre-Colombian myth as it relates the story of Makina, a young, temperamental, and free-spirited girl searching for her missing brother. Throughout her journey,...
Snow
Pamuk, Orhan
Paper Book
"A great and almost irresistibly beguiling . . . novelist. . . . Ý"Snow" is¨ enriched by . . . mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller's playfulness to the dark torment of an explorer, lost."-"The New York Times " An exiled poet...

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