The mornings are crisp. The days are shorter. Tomatoes and peaches have been replaced by apples and pumpkins at the farmer’s market. And the fall books are here! Autumn is always a busy time of year for books, with publishers releasing their big titles in the hope of capturing the interest of readers shopping for the holidays or looking to curl up with a blanket and a good book as the temperatures drop. There’s something for everyone this season, with thrilling debuts, thoughtful nonfiction, stunning poetry collections, and so much more. Readers will be particularly excited to see new titles from favorite authors like Scholastique Mukasonga and Samanta Schweblin and translators like Emma Ramadan and Megan McDowell. But don’t sleep on some of the new and exciting voices on this list too.

I’ve poured over the catalogs and galleys and highlighted just some of the best fall 2022 new releases in translation, and because there’s just so much to choose from, I’ve added notes for others you should seek out as well! And whether it’s just something about publishing this year or my ever constant love for works of short fiction, but there are a lot of new short story collections that caught my eye. So if you’d like to dip in and out of some incredible short fiction in what can be a busy time of year, you’re in luck.

Panics by Barbara Molinard, translated by Emma Ramadan

Marguerite Duras writes in her 1969 preface to Panics, “What we’ve collected in this book represents a very small portion―maybe a hundredth—of what Barbara has written over these eight years. The rest was destroyed. . . . The texts that follow were also torn to shreds.” Barbara Molinard destroyed more of her work than she saved and published only one book, this strange and surreal short story collection, saved by her close friend Duras and recovered likely from oblivion by translator Emma Ramadan in this first ever English translation. Invigorating and disorienting, this collection of stories about sickness, death, and control would be perfect for fans of Leonora Carrington. But make no mistake: this collection is absolutely its own creature. What kind of creature I’ll leave to your imagination. Complete with striking art and a stunning translator’s note, this “world of little panics” will pull you in and swallow you whole.

Visible: Text + Image by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Marie NDiaye, and others, translated by Christina MacSweeney, Emily Yan Won, and others

I’ve loved the Calico series from Two Lines Press since its inception. The series presents vanguard works of translated literature in strikingly designed―and eminently collectible―editions. Visible presents six works from around the world that think about the relationship between how we see, how we read, and how we write. In her opening piece Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated by Christina MacSweeney, writes “The image-text relationship is inescapable,” and it’s this through line that shapes and bends with each new piece in the collection. Individually they are striking but as a whole, the collection is revelatory. Each image, each word, and the spaces between them, are endlessly fascinating.

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

“Grandfather used to say, ‘When we make our cursed fetishes, it’s important that they’re pretty.’” While Bora Chung’s genre-defying collection of short stories won’t exactly curse you, it’s highly likely that by the time you finish this collection, you’ll be more than a little obsessed with its intense beauty. Wide ranging and varied, Chung’s stories pull from horror, science fiction, and fantasy with a powerful feminist and anti-capitalist lens. Chung has a background in Slavic literature and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean, which is another fascinating influence on her work. Acclaimed Korean translator Anton Hur captures all of the collection’s multitudes, from its moments of sheer terror to its sharp humor and beauty. These gripping stories of power and trauma are perfect for fans of Ha Seong-nan, translated into English by Janet Hong.

The Threshold by Iman Mersal, translated by Robyn Creswell

Iman Mersal is considered by many to be Egypt’s premier poet and I’d argue she’s one of the world’s foremost poets. So it is an immense joy to see The Threshold published this fall. It thoughtfully compiles work from Mersal’s first four collections, stretching over three decades, from 1995 to 2013, allowing readers to witness and experience the breadth of her immense talent. These poems trace her journey as a young outsider poet in Egypt to a new life in a different country. She writes about migration and displacement, borders and boundaries in art and in life, and so much more—all of the dirt in a life. They have been brilliantly translated in all of their ferocious vulnerability, intimacy, and complexity, by translator Robyn Creswell. This is a collection to return to, to inhabit.

The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras, translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes

I first came to Marguerite Duras’s work by way of Me & Other Writing, a collection of her nonfiction from Dorothy, a publishing project. It’s an unusual place to start reading a writer known more for her fiction, notably the acclaimed international bestseller The Lover, but I came upon it and was struck by the collection and the afterword provided by the translators, Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, where they discuss the process of capturing the “strangeness and mystery” of Duras, “Her incantatory rhythm that distracts you from any literal meaning, carrying you into the deep flow of her text, that inner current of genius.” And so it is a thrill to see those same translators approach The Easy Life, Duras’s second novel, published in English for the first time. First published in 1944, this foundational work is a brilliant interior novel of a young woman’s existential breakdown. What may seem like an idyllic French countryside novel is, in the hands of Duras and her masterful translators, a stunning and intense meditation on family, the self, and ultimately the mind.

And don’t miss I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee, translated by Anton Hur.

Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti

“And sometimes, a little girl, forgotten at the storyteller’s feet, who refused to go to sleep like the others, stored away in her memory, without really understanding them, the enchanted words of the fable.” In her new collection of interwoven stories, critically acclaimed author of Cockroaches and most recently Igifu, Scholastique Mukasonga writes of Rwanda in the 1940s, depicting the thunderous clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the local Christian missionaries. Women are the storytellers here and the power of storytelling and the power of women is a constant amidst the stunning imagery and cutting anti-colonial critique of this collection, translated insightfully by Mark Polizotti. An immense achievement.

And don’t miss Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken and Dawn by Sevgi Soysal, translated by Maureen Freely.

Motherfield: Poems and Belarusian Protest Diary by Julia Cimafiejeva, translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib

Julia Cimafiejeva is a Belarusian poet and translator, and the author of four poetry collections in Belarusian. She was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. Motherfield is her first collection to be brought into English, translated by a remarkable team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib. It opens with sections from her diary from August 2020 to March 2021, where she documents her life in an authoritarian Belarus―protests, escaping the police, internet shutdowns, the detention of her family and friends―and then her agonizing decision to live in exile. The combination of this diary with the poems that follow only adds to the power of this collection. A devastatingly beautiful and essential read.

Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Samanta Schweblin, author of the literary sensation Fever Dream and more recently Little Eyes returns with her second short story collection, translated into English by acclaimed translator Megan McDowell. Like her previous collection Mouthful of Birds, I was struck by the elusive and evocative nature of her stories. In Seven Empty Houses, Schweblin focuses on the intimate, on families and relationships, and the home. But these are often empty houses, where loss, grief, and trauma live amongst the boxes and bannisters. Strange and spare, tense and uncanny, the stories in Seven Empty Houses are sure to please fans of Schweblin’s uniquely unsettling style.

Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce, translated by Sarah Booker

I have been eagerly awaiting celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Ponce’s English-language debut about pleasure, pain, and power. And I can now say it utterly destroyed me. Told in a series of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts an affair, the dissolution of her marriage, and other encounters as she grasps at control over her own body. At the center of the story is the body, specifically a woman’s body, in all of its complexity―all of its blood and sweat and sex. Ponce’s writing in Sarah Booker’s crave-able translation is dark, sexy, and relentlessly good.

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer

Earlier this month Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.” Ernaux is the author of over thirty works of fiction and memoir and is considered by many to be France’s most important literary voice. Newly available in English in a scintillating translation by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is comprised of the unaltered diary entries of Ernaux’s affair with a married Soviet diplomat. Her novel Simple Passion was based on this affair, but Ernaux decided to publish her diary entries as well. “I perceived there was a ‘truth’ in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion―something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation. I thought that this, too, should be brought to light.” And there is a rawness and a darkness to it―an intense intimacy, a relentless honesty, that makes you feel alive.

This post was originally published on Book Riot.

August is Women in Translation Month! Less than 31% of books published in English translation are written by women, according to numbers pulled from the translation database started by Three Percent and Open Letter and now hosted by Publishers Weekly. Founded by literary blogger Meytal Radzinski and now in its ninth year, Women in Translation Month was started to promote women writers from around the world and combat this dreadfully low statistic. As summer rolls around each year, I go through catalogs and read a stack of galleys and pick out some of the titles by women in translation I’m most excited about published in June, July, and August.

With each new year, Women in Translation Month gets bigger, and it’s a joy to see the bookstore displays, literary events, excitement on social media, special sales, and all of the books published around this time of year, often by small independent publishers who make it a priority to include and increase the amount of books they publish by women in translation. This year’s list is a fascinating mixture of debut novels, some returning favorites like author Sayaka Murata and translator Ginny Tapley Takemori, short story collections, poetry, and so much more so I encourage you to check out these hot summer 2022 new releases by women in translation!

Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated by Julia Sanches

I love novels of summer. The kind that capture the sticky heat and restlessness that seeps into everything. Everything is just a little more intense in the summer. The emotions a little closer to the surface. It’s as if someone forgot to turn the volume down even though the pace of the world has slowed. Set in a working-class neighborhood on the Canary Islands, high near the volcano of northern Tenerife, Dogs of Summer is a perfect summer novel that follows two best friends as they come of age and their friendship begins to simmer with desire and violence. The writing is a crave inducing mix of bachata lyrics, Canary dialect, and the language of girlhood—gritty, wild, poetic—an exquisite feat by debut author Andrea Abreu and renowned translator Julia Sanches.

Chinatown by Thuận, translated by Nguyen An Lý

Acclaimed Vietnamese author Thuận is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature and Chinatown is her twelfth novel, but her first to be released in English, although I doubt it will be the last. This novel is an intense and propulsive stream of consciousness journey through Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris as one woman recounts and tries to make sense of her life and past. The question she spins around is: Is it actually possible to forget in order to live? Chinatown is a rich and surprising novel of love, memory, and loss.

When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me by Ananda Devi, translated by Kazim Ali

Acclaimed Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, who readers may know from Eve out of her Ruins and The Living Days, both translated in staggeringly gorgeous prose by Jeffrey Zuckerman, returns with a collection of poetry, this time translated by writer, poet, and translator Kazim Ali. “Let the truth leave these bodies” writes Devi in a complex and personal collection that blends poetry and autobiography and speaks in powerful truths to desire, violence, and aging. This beautiful bilingual collection also includes a translator’s note, a fascinating interview between Devi and Ali, and a short essay on reading Devi’s poetry by academic Mohit Chandna.

Witches by Brenda Lozano, translated by Heather Cleary

Paloma is dead. Her death brings together city journalist Zoe and Paloma’s cousin Feliciana, a renowned Indigenous curandera or healer in the mountain village of San Felipe. Together the two women explore trauma and healing in the wake of deeply engrained societal violence against women and gender-nonconforming people. Brenda Lozano is one of the most striking voices of a new generation of Latin American writers and I’m in awe of her thoughtful blending of these two narratives and styles. And Heather Cleary’s razor sharp translator’s note examines the political and cultural implications of the choices translators make in their work.

Bad Handwriting by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore

I adored Sara Mesa’s sharply written and atmospheric novel of power, privilege, and violence, Four by Four, also translated by Katie Whittemore, and was thrilled to see this new short story collection exploring many of the same themes. And while there was sustained terror and tension in Mesa’s novel, these stories feel even stranger and more unsettling in all that is left unsaid inherently in a short story, each pause and ending feel like a sudden drop into darkness. Bad Handwriting is also notably one of the books in Open Letter’s new Translator Triptych program, along with Wolfskin by Lara Moreno and Mothers Don’t by Katixa Agirre, all translated by Whittemore. The program is designed to honor and empower literary translators by emphasizing their role in the discovery, curation, and promotion of international literature.

Talk to My Back by Yamada Murasaki, translated by Ryan Holmberg

Drawn & Quarterly has the most fantastic offerings of literature in translation and so I was thrilled to hear about this first English translation of Yamada Murasaki’s groundbreaking alt-manga Talk to My Back. The comics were originally serialized in the influential magazine Garo from 1981–1984 when few women were creating alternative manga. Yamada details the interior lives of women in the collection, addressing domesticity, womanhood, and the failures of the nuclear family in startlingly fresh and poignant observations. I’m grateful to translator Ryan Holmberg and the publisher for bringing this book and Kuniko Tsurita’s critically-acclaimed The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud to readers who can now enjoy the work of previously unpublished women of the alt-manga scene.

Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails by Estelle-Sarah Bulle, translated by Julia Grawmeyer

Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails is a stunning novel that is both one family’s story and a sweeping epic of Guadeloupe and its diaspora that spans decades and oceans. I haven’t stopped thinking about the novel’s characters since I finished it—each is written so intimately and vividly, especially the matriarch Antoine. And while there’s a lot that’s hard to read here, as Guadeloupe’s history is marked by colonialism and capitalism and we watch this family search and struggle to find their way in the world, it is a powerful and compelling novel from debut author Estelle-Sarah Bulle and brilliantly translated by Julia Grawemeyer.

Life Ceremony: Stories by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Sayaka Murata is widely admired for her short stories in Japan so it’s thrilling to see Life Ceremony, Murata’s first short story collection available in English, out this summer in another striking translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori. In the same vein as Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, this strange, beguiling, and unconventional collection looks closely at societal expectations and pressures to conform to dizzying effect. Her characters are often outcasts and loners, or they exist just on the edge of cultural norms and traditions, and Murata, with humor and brilliance, teases out startling truths about relationships, belonging, individuality, and ultimately the nature of humanity.

This post was originally published on Book Riot.

Every season I pour over the catalogs and galleys of new releases in translation and highlight some of the titles that I’m excited about for Book Riot. I was especially impressed with this season’s incredible offerings of literature translated from Spanish. There were even more stunning titles than usual and much more than I could fit into my original list where I try to highlight the diversity of languages and countries that literature in translation is coming from. So I was inspired to create a list solely of the titles translated from Spanish this season as an added bonus. 

Looking overall at this list, I’m stunned by the breadth and depth of what’s currently being translated from Spanish right now. There are critically acclaimed and beloved authors and translators returning with their third or fourth novel right alongside some thrilling debut novels like The Wonders by Elena Medel, translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead and Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker. And there’s also a fascinating mixture of form and genre. I was particularly obsessed with the two creative nonfiction titles from this season that I chose to feature: Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney and When Women Kill by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes. 

It’s a very exciting time to be a lover of Spanish literature in translation!

Tender by Ariana Harwicz, translated by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff

Motherhood, womanhood, lust, death, madness. There’s a reason so many readers, myself included, are captivated by Ariana Harwicz’s dark and relentlessly good writing. Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary literature, often compared to Nathalie Sarraute, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Tender is the third and final book in her “Involuntary Trilogy” after Die, My Love and Feebleminded, and it finds us again in the French countryside, this time following Harwicz’s unnamed narrator’s complex and destructive relationship with her teenage son.

Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney

I loved Jazmina Barrera’s debut work of nonfiction, On Lighthouses, translated by the legend Christina MacSweeney, where she melds memoir and literary history while examining what lighthouses mean to her and more widely to us all through the the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others. So it’s no surprise that I would love her exploration of pregnancy, motherhood, and art. Like On Lighthouses, it is a memoir and also so much more. Barrera chronicles her own pregnancy and early motherhood while also reflecting on representations of motherhood in art and literature. I was particularly struck by the collection of resources she presents at the back of the book—poems, short stories, interviews, and essays—that she read while breastfeeding. The act of the artist feeding herself as she feeds her child. This urgent and intimate book is one of the most stunning I’ve ever read.

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

The events of Paradais swirl around the lives of two teenage boys as they decide on a terrifying course of action to change what feels like the inevitability of their lives. Like her impressive and brutal debut novel Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor returns with another devastating examination of violence and inequality. The novel is unsparing in its critique of racism, sexism, classism, violence, and more, and while it’s set within and is speaking to contemporary Mexican society, it is arguably universal. This brilliant and raging Cassandra of a novel is meticulously translated by Sophie Hughes who again captures Melchor’s complex and propulsive style.

New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker with additional translations by Lisa Dillman, Francisca González, Alex Ross, and the author

Cristina Rivera Garza is in my mind one of the most important writers and thinkers of our time. And so it’s an immense treat to see a collection like this one bring together in English translation stories from across her career, drawing from multiple collections over 30 years, with new writing not yet published in Spanish. If you’ve loved any of her complicated and striking works of fiction, like The Iliac Crest, translated by Sarah Booker, her feminist and gothic examination of gender and language, or The Taiga Syndrome, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, her fairy tale meets contemporary Latin American detective novel, or her new work of nonfiction, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, translated by Sarah Booker, a hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexico border, then you should pick up this collection immediately.

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

Chilean Poet follows the lives and loves of two Chilean poets across the span of decades. After a chance encounter at a nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Carla now has a 6-year-old son and the three form a new family. Eventually the relationship comes to an end, but we follow the son, Vicente, as he grows up to be a young man and also a lover of poetry. There are many joys of the novel, including Zambra’s fascinating depiction of the Chilean literary scene, a lot of (purposefully) bad poetry, and all of the stylistic inventiveness and wonder that Zambra and acclaimed translator Megan McDowell are known for. A tender and brilliant novel that surprises at every turn, Chilean Poet is a poignant examination of family and art.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady by María Gainza, translated by Thomas Bunstead

María Gainza returns with another novel of art and life in Buenos Aires. Optic Nerve, Gainza’s English-language debut, translated by Thomas Bunstead, stunned readers and critics alike with its story of an Argentinian woman obsessed with art and the many episodes of art history seamlessly interwoven into descriptions of her life—calling it gorgeous, brilliant, and profound. This novel adds an element of mystery and intrigue as the narrator, an art critic and auction house employee, is searching for an enigmatic and legendary forger, rumored to be a woman.

The Wonders by Elena Medel, translated by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead

The Wonders vividly brings to life the stories of two working women, Maria and Alicia, set against the backdrop of half a century of the feminist movement in Spain. Elena Medel is an award-winning poet, and with this audacious and expansive novel, she’s declared herself a writer to watch as she examines and portrays the ways that class, gender, politics, and society have shaped these women’s lives as well as their own plans to carve out meaning and agency.

Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán, translated by Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger

In this collection of short stories, the gifted Ecuadorian author, Gabriela Alemán, offers up a fierce and funny family album of present-day South America, particularly Ecuador. From scuba divers hunting for treasure to a reporter’s search for the secret of a famous Mexican wrestler and a baroness who settles on one of the Galapagos Islands in the 1930s, the characters in these stories are a fascinatingly endless range of humanity that Alemán writes, and Dick Cluster and Mary Ellen Fieweger translate, with wit and grace.

Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker

Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda was included on the Bógota39 list of the best 39 Latin American writers under 40 in 2017, and in 2019 she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award. Jawbone is her English-language debut and it follows Fernanda and Annelise, two inseparably close friends at an elite Catholic school who become ever more involved in the occult with their school friends. “It’s only fun if it’s dangerous,” says Annelise, perfectly capturing the reading experience of this chilling nightmare of girlhood and adolescence, full of body horror, pleasure, and pain. Sarah Booker’s immense brilliance and thoughtfulness comes through in this translation as it does in all of her others and she’s become a translator I’ll follow to any (and all) of her next projects.

When Women Kill by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes

When Alia Trabucco Zerán’s debut novel The Remainder came out in 2019—also translated by Sophie Hughes—I described it as intense and haunting and a startling reckoning with the history of violence. So it’s fascinating to me that this next project from Alia Trabucco Zerán is very much in line with the idea of a history of violence. In When Women Kill, Alia Trabucco Zerán draws on her training as a lawyer to examine four homicides by Chilean women. These accounts blend true crime, critical essay, and reportage to offer a nuanced and feminist reading of these women’s lives.

This post was originally published on Book Riot.