The Taiga Syndrome By Cristina Rivera Garza, Suzanne Jill Levine (translator) A fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple that has fled to the far reaches of the Earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to[…]
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Accommodations By Wioletta Greg, Jennifer Croft (translator) Accommodations follows Wiola after she leaves her childhood village, a close-knit agricultural community in Poland where the Catholic calendar and local gossip punctuate daily life. Her new independence in the nearby city of Czestochowa is far from a fresh start, as she moves between a hostel and a[…]
Faces on the Tip of My Tongue By Emmanuelle Pagano Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion. The late wedding guest isn’t your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and[…]
You Would Have Missed Me By Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch (translator) ‘I can’t remember what it was like being born, but from what they used to tell me it seemed almost as if everything had been fine up to that point.’ Standing in her family’s two-bedroom flat in the Promised Land, a little girl realizes[…]
Children of The Cave By Virve Sammalkorpi, Emily and Fleur Jeremiah (translator) ‘It’s dangerous to be different where everyone else is alike. Have you noticed?’ 1819, Iax Agolasky, a young assistant to a notable French explorer, sets off on a journey to the Russian wildnerness. The travellers discover a group of creatures living in a[…]
Soviet Milk By Nora Ikstena, Margita Gailitis (translator) The literary bestseller that took the Baltics by storm now published for the first time in English. This novel considers the effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. The central character in the story tries to follow her calling as a doctor. But then the state[…]
Bride and Groom By Alisa Ganieva, Carol Apollonio (Translator) From one of the most exciting voices in modern Russian literature, Alisa Ganieva, comes Bride and Groom, the tumultuous love story of two young city-dwellers who meet when they return home to their families in rural Dagestan. When traditional family expectations and increasing religious and cultural[…]
Öræfi: The Wasteland By Ófeigur Sigurðsson, Lytton Smith (Translator) After a grueling solo expedition on the Vatnajökull Glacier, Austrian toponymist Bernhardt Fingerberg returns to civilization, barely alive, and into the care of Dr. Lassi. The doctor, suspicious of his story, attempts to discover his real motives for venturing into the treacherous wastelands of Iceland —[…]
Slave Old Man By Patrick Chamoiseau, Linda Coverdale (Translator) We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man’s flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing—even otherworldly—ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality[…]
The Polyglot Lovers By Lina Wolff, Saskia Vogel (Translator) ‘Do you have to stare like that?’ I asked. ‘Think about the actors in porn. They’ve got no problem showing themselves off.’ ‘Think about when I broke your nose,’ I replied. Ellinor is thirty-six. She wears soft black sweatpants and a Michelin Man jacket. She fights.[…]
