Books in Translation 2024

"ABOUT BLUE LARD The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination. Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author's books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow's...

<p><i>Narcissus and Goldmund</i> is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. Narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself solely to scholarly and spiritual pursuits. One of his students is the sensual, restless Goldmund, who is immediately drawn to his teacher's fierce intellect and sense of discipline. When Narcissus persuades the young student that he is...

Liborio calls upon his highly-honed survival skills to escape Mexico, sharing his journey and speaking of migrants' social problems via love letters to his girl.

Set in a distant future, after the invention of faster-than-light space travel has propelled a still-immature mankind into the far corners of the Milky Way, the novel features creatures of immense variety - amoebas that cover entire worlds, sensual females that feed on substances from their males' reproductive systems, talking reptiles, and other creations drawn from the classics of Cuban and international science fiction - all of which serve as colleagues,...

"Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including...

War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. A s Napoleon’s...

"This response to Camus's The Stranger is at once a love story and a political manifesto about post-colonial Algeria, Islam, and the irrelevance of Arab lives. He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus's classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name--Musa--and...

A young lawyer reflects on the mid-twentieth-century uprising between Pablo Escobar's drug cartel and government forces that trapped Pablo's community in a nightmarish existence and culminated in a friend's murder.

"Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories--spiraling from real events--that bleed together reportage and the author's rich and rigorous imagination. These narrative nonfiction pieces probe deeply into the motivations of murderers and misfits, into their desires and circumstances, forcing us to understand them--and even empathize--despite our wish to simply label them monsters. As in...