2024 in Review: Literature in Translation

by Bothayna Al-Essa; translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain

A censor working to remove from books all mentions of queerness, unapproved religions, and any mentions of life before the Revolution is haunted at night by the characters of literary classics enticing him to read the forbidden tomes. 

by Elias Khoury; translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

Weaving personal and cultural memory into a tale about Palestinian experience, Star of the Sea is the story of a boy uprooted to Haifa after the death of his father in the 1948 Nakba. Here he spins for himself a new life, presenting himself as an Israeli born into the Warsaw ghetto. There are limits to this charade, however; lines he’s forbidden to cross—and when he falls in love with his friend's only daughter he steps, unawares, into a third life. The follow-up to My Name Is Adam, Star of the Sea is the second installment of a trilogy about love, survival, and ongoing devastation.

by Vigdis Hjorth; translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund

What happens when passion is mistaken for love? Vigdis Hjorth's novel documents a decade of destruction in a woman's life when she makes just such a mistake.

by Pedro Lemebel; translated from the Spanish by Gwendolyn Harper

“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel (1952–2015), a queer writer and artist who lived through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In essays combining memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless. This volume brings together a selection of the best of his work, published in English for the first time, which introduces new readers to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde reverberate around the world.

by Yoko Ogawa; translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

In 1972, 12-year-old Tomoko is sent to stay with her affluent aunt’s family in a coastal town in Japan. She is soon beguiled by her devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, her charming uncle, and her cousin Mina, who draws her into an intoxicating world of secrets and storytelling. But it's not long before she discovers the truth behind their glittering façade.

by Daniel Saldaña París; translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman

In 10 intimate essays, Daniel Saldaña París, a Cullman Center Fellow at NYPL in 2022–23, explores the cities he's lived in, each one home to a new iteration of himself. In Mexico City he's a young poet eager to prove himself. In Montreal—an opioid addict desperate for relief. In Madrid—a lonely student seeking pleasure in grotesque extremes. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth?

by Yōko Tawada; translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani

In a sequel to Scattered All Over the Earth, Hiruko, along with an idiosyncratic band of friends, search for someone who speaks her mother tongue after Japan, known as the Land of Sushi, has vanished into the sea. As they travel, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways and empower each other against despair. In their travels, they discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship—loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going—sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more. 
 

by Mariana Enriquez; translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

A collection of 12 unsettling stories where ordinary people living in Argentina, particularly women, are forced to confront terrifying and surreal encounters with the supernatural.

by Yáng Shuang-zi; translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan longing to experience real island life and its authentic cuisine. A young Taiwanese woman, Chizuru, is hired as her interpreter and cook and arranges Chizuko's travels. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the "something" is. Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

by Emmanuel Carrère; translated from the French by John Lambert

For 10 months beginning in the fall of 2021, the most expensive and complex trial in French history—featuring 20 men accused of involvement in the 2015 attacks on the Bataclan and other sites across Paris—was underway. Nearly every day, Emmanuel Carrère was in the courtroom to bear witness. V13 isn’t so much the story of a trial but of the community that formed around it—a city within the city, home to the innocent and the accused, the forgiving and the vengeful, the outspoken and the silent. Carrère introduces us to lawyers, survivors, family members, and the defendants, assembling in painstaking detail a human portrait of a terrible crime.

by Hwang Bo-reum; translated from the Korean by Shanna Tan

After quitting her job and divorcing her husband, Yeong-Ju, in a leap of faith, opens the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, and, welcoming new friends and visitors to her circle, builds an inviting space for hurt and lost souls to rest, heal, and learn how to write their own stories.

by Álvaro Enrigue; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

No one really knows what happened when conquistador Hernán Cortés met Aztec emperor Moctezuma in 1519. Álvaro Enrigue's brilliant gonzo reimagining brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height and dramatizes the trippy final hours before this fateful, historic encounter reached its bloody climax. The visionary author of Sudden Death, a former Cullman Center Fellow at NYPL, depicts a Technicolor collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages—and two possible futures.