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It’s that time of year again! Best Translated Book Award time! Below is the 25-book strong longlist, just announced over at The Millions, which includes a few of my favorites (Compass<\/em>,\u00a0My Heart Hemmed In<\/em>, and Radiant Terminus<\/em>) as well as many I have not read yet.<\/p>\nThere are some notable books that missed the cut: Domenico Starnone’s\u00a0Ties<\/em>, Mihail Sebastian’s\u00a0For Two Thousand Years<\/em>, and Patrick Modiano’s\u00a0Sundays in August<\/em>. At the same time, this is a varied list, with many newcomers.<\/p>\n As a reminder, books are eligible for this year’s prize only if they were published in English in the United States last year\u00a0for the first time ever<\/em>. So, no re-translations are eligible. All of us are just getting to know these, even if they were written decades ago and the authors have long since passed on (a handful of the authors below are dead). Go check them out!<\/p>\n The ten finalists will be announced on May 15. The winner will be announced on May 31.<\/p>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n A daring novel that made Christine Angot one of the most controversial figures in contemporary France recounts the narrator’s incestuous relationship with her father. Tess Lewis’s forceful translation brings into English this audacious novel of taboo.<\/p>\n The narrator is falling out from a torrential relationship with another woman. Delirious with love and yearning, her thoughts grow increasingly cyclical and wild, until exposing the trauma lying behind her pain. With the intimacy offered by a confession, the narrator embarks on a psychoanalysis of herself, giving the reader entry into her tangled experiences with homosexuality, paranoia, and, at the core of it all, incest. In a masterful translation from the French by Tess Lewis, Christine Angot’s Incest<\/i> audaciously confronts its readers with one of our greatest taboos.<\/p>\n Her books are an incantation, biblical in their onrush of verbs, nouns, names, and deliberate repetitions (yes, I, too, repeat myself) in the service of rhythm and camouflage, compelling you to read on, for sound, for cadence, for poetry. I\u2019m a woman of no convictions, she says. I\u2019m a woman of strong convictions, she also says. It\u2019s as if she were saying: The two of us (you and I, reader) are in a maze of my creation; let\u2019s see how you, we, fare. She puts everything on the line; she is not embarrassed. She tells us, \u201cIncest<\/em> is the book in which I present myself as a real shit, all writers should do it at least once.\u201d She lays herself bare and invites us to take a bite. ~Tsipi Keller,\u00a0Asymptote<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ana\u00efs Barbeau-Lavalette never knew her mother\u2019s mother. Curious to understand why her grandmother, Suzanne, a sometime painter and poet associated with Les Automatistes, a movement of dissident artists that included Paul-\u00c9mile Borduas, abandoned her husband and young family, Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together Suzanne\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Suzanne<\/i>, winner of the Prix des libraires du Qu\u00e9bec and a bestseller in French, is a fictionalized account of Suzanne\u2019s life over eighty-five years, from Montreal to New York to Brussels, from lover to lover, through an abortion, alcoholism, Buddhism, and an asylum. It takes readers through the Great Depression, Qu\u00e9bec’s Quiet Revolution, women\u2019s liberation, and the American civil rights movement, offering a portrait of a volatile, fascinating woman on the margins of history. And it\u2019s a granddaughter\u2019s search for a past for herself, for understanding and forgiveness.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve become conditioned, in the books we read and the films we watch, to our heroines achieving some form of redemption, however problematic they might be and however spurious that redemption. But as you might have guessed, Suzanne isn\u2019t that kind of novel, and that\u2019s because Suzanne wasn\u2019t that kind of person. ~Ian McGillis,\u00a0The Montreal Gazette<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n A retired, senile bank clerk confined to his basement apartment, T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson decides that, since memoirs are all the rage, he’s going to write his own\u2014a sure bestseller\u2014that will also right the wrongs of contemporary Icelandic society. Egoistic, cranky, and digressive, T\u00f3mas blasts away while relating pick-up techniques, meditations on chamber pot use, ways to assign monetary value to noise pollution, and much more. His rants parody and subvert the idea of the memoir\u2014something that’s as relevant today in our memoir-obsessed society as it was when the novel was first published.<\/p>\n Considered by many to be the ‘Icelandic Ulysses<\/i>‘ for its wordplay, neologisms, structural upheaval, and reinvention of what’s possible in Icelandic writing, T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller<\/i> was a bestseller, heralding a new age of Icelandic literature.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not the most appetizing of visions, but Bergsson\u2019s shaggy (and, in a couple of instances, carefully shaven) dog stories have a certain weird charm, even as it develops that J\u00f3nsson has discovered one great raison d\u2019\u00eatre for writing a memoir: revenge. ~Kirkus<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.<\/p>\n With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias \u00c9nard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources — nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie — and binds them together in a most magical way.<\/p>\n So much now weighs on Franz — inescapably, all the history he’s accumulated, but personally, too, his own confrontation with mortality (and, before that, the promise of what should be, medically, an ugly decline) as well as the literally out of reach woman whom he can’t get out of his thoughts, a debate-partner (among much else) debating now at such a distant remove. \u00c9nard manages to make what is essentially this sleep-deprived protagonist’s monologue consistently entertaining — no wonder he can’t sleep, with all this bubbling in his mind — with enough of the human to the story to make even the more obscurely scholarly go down comfortably easily.<\/p>\n A fine piece of writing, and a very enjoyable work. ~M.A. Orthofer,\u00a0The Complete Review<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bergeners<\/i> is a love letter to a writer\u2019s hometown. The book opens in New York City at the swanky Standard Hotel and closes in Berlin at Askanischer Hof, a hotel that has seen better days. But between these two global metropolises we find Bergen, Norway\u2014its streets and buildings and the people who walk those streets and live in those buildings.<\/p>\n Using James Joyce\u2019s Dubliners<\/i> as a discrete guide, celebrated Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal wanders the streets of his hometown. On the journey, he takes notes, reflects, writes a diary, and draws portraits of the city and its inhabitants. Espedal writes tales and short stories, meets fellow writers, and listens to their anecdotes. In a way that anyone from a small town can relate to, he is drawn away from Bergen but at the same time he can\u2019t seem to stay away. Espedal\u2019s Bergeners<\/i> is a book not just about Bergen, but about life\u2014in a way no one else could have captured.<\/p>\n Bergeners<\/i> is unusual (non)fiction, but often fascinating and certainly well-done; it’s also a very moving personal work, with the feel and appearance of still waters, running oh so deep. ~M.A. Orthofer,\u00a0The Complete Review<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n An aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically dramatic manner: traveling to the Hadron Collider, merging with the God particle, and transforming into an omnipresent deity — a meta-writer — capable of rewriting reality.<\/p>\n With biting humor and a propulsive, contagious style, amid the accelerated particles of his characteristic obsessions — the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the music of Pink Floyd and The Kinks, 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/i>, the links between great art and the lives of the artists who create it — Fres\u00e1n takes us on a whirlwind tour of writers and muses, madness and genius, friendships, broken families, and alternate realities, exploring themes of childhood, loss, memory, aging, and death.<\/p>\n Drawing inspiration from the scope of modern classics and the structural pyrotechnics of the postmodern masters, the Argentine once referred to as “a pop Borges” delivers a powerful defense of great literature, a celebration of reading and writing, of the invented parts — the stories we tell ourselves to give shape to our world.<\/p>\n Admittedly, the question of whether The Invented Part<\/em> is a novel was a rhetorical exercise meant to draw out certain aspects of this text. Of course, it is a novel. It is, however, something much more: a resounding refutation of the assertion that the novel is dead, and a statement of how omnivorous and adaptable the form is. ~George Henson, Quarterly Conversation<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Santiago Gamboa is one of Colombia’s most exciting young writers. In the manner of Roberto Bola\u00f1o, Gamboa infuses his kaleidoscopic, cosmopolitan stories with a dose of inky dark noir that makes his novels intensely readable, his characters unforgettable, and his style influential.<\/p>\n Manuela Beltr\u00e1n, a woman haunted by a troubled childhood she tries to escape through books and poetry; Tertuliano, an Argentine preacher who claims to be the Pope’s son, ready to resort to extreme methods to create a harmonious society; Ferdinand Palacios, a Colombian priest with a dark paramilitary past now confronted with his guilt; Rimbaud, the precocious, brilliant poet whose life was incessant exploration; and, Juana and the consul, central characters in Gamboa’s Night Prayers<\/i>, who are united in a relationship based equally on hurt and need. These characters animate Gamboa’s richly imagined portrait of a hostile, turbulent world where liberation is found in perpetual movement and determined exploration.<\/p>\n His novel follows five seemingly unrelated story lines: a brilliant but emotionally scarred female poet; a writer turned one-time diplomat (simply referred to as Consul<\/em>); an Argentine neo-Nazi evangelist; a priest-turned-rebel; and the celebrated French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. The novel is divided into two parts and an accompanying epilogue over the course of which we become well acquainted with the journeys and miraculous crossing of paths of its protagonists. Gamboa seamlessly weaves together biography and fiction, at times even borrowing from his own, quite fascinating life. ~Amir Soleimanpour, Los Angeles Review of Books<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n A haunting novel about an unusual family\u2019s breakdown\u2014set in South America during the time of Che Guevara and inspired by the life of Third Reich cinematographer Hans Ertl\u2014from the literary star Jonathan Safran Foer calls, \u201ca great writer.\u201d<\/p>\n Inspired by real events, Affections<\/i> is the story of the eccentric, fascinating Ertl clan, headed by the egocentric and extraordinary Hans, once the cameraman for the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Shortly after the end of World War II, Hans and his family flee to Bolivia to start over. There, the ever-restless Hans decides to embark on an expedition in search of the fabled lost Inca city of Paitit\u00ed, enlisting two of his daughters to join him on his outlandish quest into the depths of the Amazon, with disastrous consequences.<\/p>\n Set against the backdrop of the both optimistic and violent 1950s and 1960s, Affections<\/i> traces the Ertls\u2019s slow and inevitable breakdown through the various erratic trajectories of each family member: Hans\u2019s undertakings of colossal, foolhardy projects and his subsequent spectacular failures; his daughter Monika, heir to his adventurous spirit, who joins the Bolivian Marxist guerrillas and becomes known as \u201cChe Guevara\u2019s avenger\u201d; and his wife and two younger sisters left to pick up the pieces in their wake. In this short but powerful work, Hasb\u00fan weaves a masterfully layered tale of how a family\u2019s voyage of discovery ends up eroding the affections that once held it together.<\/p>\n A one-sitting tale of fragmented relationships with a broad scope, delivered with grace and power. ~Kirkus<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n What falsehoods do we believe as children? And what happens when we realize they are lies?possibly heinous ones? In Old Rendering Plant<\/i> Wolfgang Hilbig turns his febrile, hypnotic prose to the intersection of identity, language, and history\u2019s darkest chapters, immersing readers in the odors and oozings of a butchery that has for years dumped biological waste into a river. It starts when a young boy becomes obsessed with an empty and decayed coal plant, coming to believe that it is tied to mysterious disappearances throughout the countryside. But as a young man, with the building now turned into an abattoir processing dead animals, he revisits this place and his memories of it, realizing just how much he has missed. Plumbing memory\u2019s mysteries while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone indebted to Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, menacing tale refracts the lost innocence of youth through the heavy burdens of maturity.<\/p>\n In the spirit of Proust\u2019s Swann\u2019s Way \u2014<\/em>\u00a0the section of his opus that features this olfactory moment \u2014 Wolfgang Hilbig\u2019s Old Rendering Plant<\/em> is a sensory novel that uses scent to flatten time. But whereas Proust uses a teacake to evoke a French village, Hilbig uses dissolving animal corpses to evoke postwar East Germany. Old Rendering Plant<\/em>, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole and published by Two Lines Press, is about a man\u2019s experience of a decaying slaughterhouse and a river full of toxic sludge. Like Proust\u2019s, Hilbig\u2019s writing has a beautiful and dream-like quality. But Old Rendering Plant<\/em> is about tarnished ground. Entombed in the visceral smells of the sickly landscape, the unnamed narrator floats through it in paralyzed fashion. ~Nathan Scott McNamara, Los Angeles Review of Books<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX<\/em>, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don\u2019t rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.<\/p>\n In Jaeggy\u2019s world, characters don\u2019t change or have epiphanies\u2014unless a sudden cruelty, a murder, or a suicide counts. They are as they are, and much of what they are is related to where they\u2019re from\u2014the soil in which they were planted. This is especially true in Jaeggy\u2019s stories, where social position, citizenship, and class confer on everyone a sort of generic character: foreigners en route to visit Auschwitz are laughing and \u201carrogant with everyone,\u201d but, as they approach their destination, \u201cthey instantly put on an air of decorum\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. an ostentation of grief.\u201d Young farmhands have \u201cmeek, stubborn skulls .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. They were like brothers to the cattle.\u201d These are reminiscent of the archetypal characters one finds in the Brothers Grimm. Particularly in Jaeggy\u2019s earlier work, objects and settings are generalized, rarely pinned to a specific time and place: we encounter a house with a garden, a wooden cross, a pastor, incestuous twins, crystal glasses, a gauzy blue dress. ~Sheila Heti, The New Yorker<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n “It is fitting that I’m beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air.”<\/i><\/p>\n This passage is from the first entry of a journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann’s spellbinding new novel. It is the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany\u2014a house that thwarts the expectations of the narrator’s recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. He is eager to finish a screenplay\u00a0for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around him\u2014and within him.<\/p>\n The new book by the German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann, \u201cYou Should Have Left,\u201d is a minor trick for him, but a neat one. This mind-bending novella about a writer losing his marbles contains images that startle and linger. ~John Williams, The New York Times<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n This canonical work of Polish reportage is a terse, unexpected human lesson born of an occupation-era love story. Based on a true story, the raw interplay of history and fictionalization spans the Warsaw Ghetto, the war-torn countryside, and the nightmare of Auschwitz.<\/p>\n Quirky and powerful treatments of the Holocaust exist in recent literature and film, but Krall’s joyous and wise Izolda gets under your skin in ways both subversive and uplifting. Thanks to Peirene Press and Philip Boehm’s glorious translation, you now have in your hands a masterpiece. ~Kapka Kassabova, The Guardian<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n The first novel from Madagascar ever to be translated into English, Naivo\u2019s magisterial Beyond the Rice Fields<\/i> delves into the upheavals of the nation\u2019s past as it confronted Christianity and modernity, through the twin narratives of a slave and his master\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n Fara and her father\u2019s slave, Tsito, have been close since her father bought the boy after his forest village was destroyed. Now in Sahasoa, amongst the cattle and rice fields, everything is new for Tsito, and Fara at last has a companion. But as Tsito looks forward to the bright promise of freedom and Fara, backward to a dark, long-denied family history, a rift opens between them just as British Christian missionaries and French industrialists arrive and violence erupts across the country. Love and innocence fall away, and Tsito and Fara\u2019s world becomes enveloped by tyranny, superstition, and fear.<\/p>\n With captivating lyricism, propulsive urgency, and two unforgettable characters at the story\u2019s core, Naivo unflinchingly delves into the brutal history of nineteenth-century Madagascar. Beyond the Rice Fields<\/i> is a tour de force that has much to teach us about human bondage and the stories we tell to face\u2014and hide from\u2014ourselves, each other, our pasts, and our destinies.<\/p>\n The author wrote this book in French, not in Malagasy. In other words, he chose to use \u201cvazaha<\/em> words\u201d to tell this story. And yet, the novel is not an easy one for foreigners. This is no Things Fall Apart<\/em>, setting out a simple before-and-after story of how colonialism impacted Africa. Rather, Beyond the Rice Fields<\/em> is a spiraling, dense, and prickly work, difficult to access until the foreign reader has agreed to put in some time and effort. But once the effort is put in, it is richly rewarding. ~Kate Prengel, World Literature Today<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Purchase from Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Marie NDiaye has long been celebrated for her unrivaled ability to make us see just how little we understand about ourselves. My Heart Hemmed In<\/i> is her most powerful statement on the hidden selves that we rarely glimpse — and are often shocked by.<\/p>\n There is something very wrong with Nadia and her husband Ange, middle-aged provincial schoolteachers who slowly realize that they are despised by everyone around them. One day a savage wound appears in Ange’s stomach, and as Nadia fights to save her husband’s life their hideous neighbor Noget — a man everyone insists is a famous author — inexplicably imposes his care upon them. While Noget fattens them with ever richer foods, Nadia embarks on a nightmarish visit to her ex-husband and estranged son — is she abandoning Ange or revisiting old grievances in an attempt to save him?<\/p>\n Conjuring an atmosphere of paranoia and menace, My Heart Hemmed In<\/i> creates a bizarre, foggy world where strange coincidences, harsh cruelty, and constantly shifting relationships all seem part of some shadowy truth. Surreal, allegorical, and psychologically acute, My Heart Hemmed In<\/i> shows a masterful author giving her readers her most complex and compelling world yet.<\/p>\n Realistically chilling in spite of \u2014 and because of \u2014 their absurdity and lingering mystery, Marie NDiaye\u2019s novels are becoming ever more important to me as they look deeply into the hearts of troubled individuals, fighting against their very selves.\u00a0My Heart Hemmed In<\/em> is the latest to be translated into English, and it is my favorite. I suspect, though, that that\u2019s only in part due to the book itself. I\u2019m sure the other part is that I\u2019m becoming more in tune with what NDiaye is doing, more adept at reading her strange tales, so I\u2019m getting more out of each book. Certainly, I loved this one from page one until the end, reading it almost non-stop over a few otherwise hazy days in July. ~Trevor Berrett, The Mookse and the Gripes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Incest.jpg?resize=367%2C450\")
Incest<\/span><\/strong>
\n<\/span><\/i> by Christine Angot
\ntranslated from the French by Tess Lewis
\n(France, Archipelago)<\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Suzanne.jpg?resize=289%2C450\")
Suzanne<\/span><\/strong>
\n<\/span><\/i> by Ana\u00efs Barbeau-Lavalette
\ntranslated from <\/span>the <\/span>French by Rhonda Mullins
\n(Canada, Coach House)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Tomas-Jonsson-Best-seller.jpg?resize=292%2C450\")
T\u00f3mas J\u00f3nsson, Bestseller<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby <\/span><\/span>Gu\u00f0bergur Bergsson<\/span>
\n<\/span>translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith
\n(Iceland, Open Letter Books)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Compass-689x1024.jpg?resize=303%2C450\")
Compass<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Mathias \u00c9nard<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Charlotte Mandell <\/span>
\n(France, New Directions)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Bergeners.jpg?resize=284%2C450\")
Bergeners<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\n<\/span>by Tomas Espedal
\ntranslated from the Norwegian by James Anderson
\n(Norway, Seagull Books)<\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/The-Invented-Part.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
The Invented Part<\/i><\/strong><\/span>
\nby Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n<\/span>
\ntranslated from <\/span><\/span>the <\/span>Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
\n(Argentina, Open Letter Books)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Return-to-the-Dark-Valley-655x1024.jpg?resize=288%2C450\")
Return to the Dark Valley<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Santiago Gamboa<\/span>
\ntranslated from <\/span><\/span>the <\/span>Spanish by Howard Curtis
\n(Colombia, Europa Editions)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Affections-636x1024.jpg?resize=329%2C530\")
Affections<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Rodrigo Hasb\u00fan<\/span>
\ntranslated from <\/span><\/span>the <\/span>Spanish by Sophie Hughes
\n(Bolivia, Simon and Schuster)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Old-Rendering-Plant-658x1024.jpg?resize=289%2C450\")
Old Rendering Plant<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Wolfgang Hilbig<\/span>
\ntranslated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole <\/span>
\n(Germany, Two Lines Press)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/I-Am-the-Brother-of-XX.jpg?resize=319%2C450\")
I Am the Brother of XX<\/i><\/strong><\/span>
\nby Fleur Jaeggy<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff <\/span>
\n(Switzerland, New Directions)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/You-Should-Have-Left.jpg?resize=306%2C450\")
You Should Have Left<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Daniel Kehlmann<\/span>
\n translated from <\/span><\/span>the <\/span>German by Ross Benjamin
\n(Germany, Pantheon)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Chasing-the-King-of-Hearts.jpg?resize=310%2C450\")
Chasing the King of Hearts<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Hanna Krall<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Polish by Philip Boehm<\/span>
\n (Poland, Feminist Press)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Beyond-the-Rice-Fields.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
Beyond the Rice Fields<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Naivo<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Allison M. Charette <\/span>
\n(Madagascar, Restless Books)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/My_Heart_Hemmed_In_780X1248-390x624.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
My Heart Hemmed In<\/i><\/strong><\/span>
\nby Marie NDiaye<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Jordan Stump<\/span>
\n (France, Two Lines Press)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Savage-Theories-683x1024.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
Savage Theories<\/i><\/span><\/strong>
\nby Pola Oloixarac<\/span>
\ntranslated from <\/span><\/span>the <\/span>Spanish by Roy Kesey
\n(Argentina, Soho Press)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/August-664x1024.jpg?resize=292%2C450\")
August<\/i><\/strong><\/span>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/The-Magician-of-Vienna.jpg?resize=286%2C450\")
The Magician of Vienna<\/i><\/span><\/strong>