Friday, December 10, 2021

Coming Soon...

Herbert
by Nabarun Bhattacharya
Translated from the Bengali by Sunandini Banerjee



Coming Soon...

Wildfire
And Other Stories
by Banaphool
Translated from the Bengali by Somnath Zutshi



Coming Soon...

Karimayi
by Chandrasekhar Kambar 
Translated from the Kannada by Krishna Manavalli



Coming Soon...

Aranyak
Of the Forest
by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
Translated from the Bengali by Rimli Bhattacharya





Coming Soon...

Wolves and Other Stories
by Bhuwaneshwar
Translated from the Bengali by Saudamini Deo



Coming Soon...

The Open-Winged Scorpion and Other Stories
by Abul Bashar
Translated from the Bengali by Epsita Halder, with Sunandini Banerjee



Coming Soon...

Monsoon
by Vimala Devi
Translated from the Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro 



Saturday, November 27, 2021

Coming Soon...

Nostalgia
by Mircea Cărtărescu
Translated from the Romanian by Julian Semilian 



Thursday, November 25, 2021

Coming Soon...

Last Train to Istanbul
by Ayşe Kulin 
Translated from the Turkish by John W. Baker







Coming Soon...

The Birdwoman's Palate 
by Laksmi Pamuntjak  
Translated from the Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao 




Coming Soon...

Chaos, A Fable
by Rodrigo Rey Rosa 
Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Gray 



Coming Soon...

A Fist or a Heart
by Kristín Eiríksdóttir
Translated from the Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer



Coming Soon...

Your Ad Could Go Here: Stories
by Oksana Zabuzhko
Translated from the Ukrainian by  Nina Murray (Editor, Translator), Halyna Hryn  (Translator), Askold Melnyczuk (Translator), Marco Carynnyk (Translator), Marta Horban (Translator)



Sunday, November 7, 2021

Coming Soon...

Monkey Man
by Takuji Ichikawa
Translated from the Japanese by Lisa and Daniel Lilley



Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Coming Soon...

Waiting for the Waters to Rise
by Maryse Condé
Translated from the French by Richard Philcox





Coming Soon...

Planet of Clay
by Samar Yazbek
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price



Coming Soon...

Kruso
by Lutz Seiler 
Translated from the German by Tess Lewis



Coming Soon...

Elly
by Maike Wetzel 
Translated from the German by Lyn Marven










Coming Soon...

The Blessed Rita
by Tommy Wieringa 
Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett



Coming Soon...

The Liquid Land 
by Raphaela Edelbauer 
Translated from the German by Jen Calleja



Coming Soon...

Little Brother 
an odyssey to Europe
by Ibrahima Balde and Amets Arzallus Antia 
Translated from the Basque by Timberlake Wertenbaker



Saturday, September 4, 2021

Coming Soon...

Earthlings
by Sayaka Murata
Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori



Coming Soon...

TRAVELLING LIGHT
BY TOVE JANSSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY SILVESTER MAZZARELLA



Coming Soon...

THE TRUE DECEIVER
BY TOVE JANSSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY THOMAS TEAL




Coming Soon...

FAIR PLAY
BY TOVE JANSSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY THOMAS TEAL



Coming Soon...

A WINTER BOOK
BY TOVE JANSSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY SILVESTER MAZZARELLA, DAVID MCDUFF AND KINGSLEY HART



Coming Soon...

THE LISTENER
BY TOVE JANSSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY THOMAS TEAL



Coming Soon...

THE SUMMER BOOK
BY TOVE JANSSON
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY THOMAS TEAL



Sunday, August 8, 2021

Coming Soon...

Heaven
by Mieko Kawakami
Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd





Coming Soon...

The Anomaly
by Hervé Le Tellier  
Translator from the French by Adriana Hunter 




Coming Soon...

Khwabnama 
by Akhteruzzaman Elias  
Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha



Coming Soon...

Hard Like Water
by Yan Lianke
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas



Coming Soon...

The Explosion Chronicles
by Yan Lianke
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas



Coming Soon...

Lenin's Kisses
by Yan Lianke  
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas 



Coming Soon...

The Four Books
by Yan Lianke
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas





Friday, July 2, 2021

Coming Soon...

Singer in the Night
by Olja Savičević
Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth



Coming Soon...

Our Daily Bread
by Predrag Matvejević
Translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribićević-Zorić



Coming Soon...

The Fig Tree
by Goran Vojnović
Translated from the Slovene by Olivia Hellewell




Coming Soon...

Blind Man
by Mitja Čander 
Translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau



Coming Soon...

Summer Brother
by Jaap Robben 
Translated from the Dutch by David Doherty 



Coming Soon...

Game of the Gods
by Paolo Maurensig  
Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel 




Coming Soon...

The Helios Disaster
by Linda Boström Knausgård  
Translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles 



Sunday, June 6, 2021

Coming Soon...

Lemon
by Kwon Yeo-Sun
Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong



Coming Soon...

A Long Way from Douala
by Max Lobe 
Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz



Coming Soon...

The Little Devil and Other Stories
by Alexei Remizov 
Translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis





Coming Soon...

The Loser
by Fatos Kongoli
Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie & Janice Mathie-Heck





Coming Soon...

Bilbao – New York – Bilbao
by Kirmen Uribe
Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin



Coming Soon...

The World, the Lizard and Me
by Gil Courtemanche
Translated from the French by David Homel





Coming Soon...

Ukulele Jam
by Alen Mešković
Translation from the by Danish Paul Russell Garrett






Monday, May 3, 2021

Sunday is Gloomy...

The narrator begins by recounting a Sunday visit to her elder sister Claire Marie at her residence in a Parisian suburb Ville-d'Avray.  There her sister lives with her physician husband Christian and their daughter Mélanie. As the narration progresses, she remembers episodes from her childhood with her sister, spent in Brussels, suffused with dreams, longings, horrors, and their fancy and fondness—some of the childhood traits have found their way into their adult lives as well—for television or novel's character.

She characterizes her sister and her oddities, and is frank to share the discomfort she and her husband feel sometimes with her sister, and she is also well aware about the malaise Claire Marie feels because of them, which is often visible in her gesture and other ways. We find a psychological tension in this sisterly relation though everything seems fine between them; they have a sisterly resentment towards each other. Like a chorus to a beautiful but sad and gloomy song; here referral to Sunday2 comes often, which is a day deeply rooted to the sister's childhood memories, and which sets a perfect tone to the story. Through the narrator's observation1, the author has perfectly captured the mood, the silence, the seasonal transition, the stillness… like that of a perfectly composed art, of Parisian suburb; of Ville-d'Avray.

       1. AND SO I WAS FULL OF MEMORIES, I was in the melancholy state of mind that often comes over me when I go to see my sister, and I think I started by getting a little lost in Ville-d’Avray, by driving through the provincial, peaceful streets of my sister’s neighborhood, past private homes with their gleaming bay windows, their porches, their phony airs (Art Deco villa, Norman country house), their gardens planted with rosebushes and cedars.

2.On Sundays—don’t you think?—certain things come back to you more than on other days.”… she said, “On Sundays, you think about life.”




In their quiet conversation in the dusk, soon Claire Marie opts to tell the narrator about an episode in her life, when she'd an inexplicable relationship many years ago with a strange man named Marc Hermann—whom as a patient she'd met first time in her husband's clinic. In her confession, Claire Marie points that what started as an ordinary chance encounter, a way out to her routine life, soon became a mindless3 continuation, and ceased to become romantic and turned to a horrific compulsion she wanted to escape. The story continues, perfused with narrator's insight into her relation with her sister, all portrayed in the gripping ambience, with Claire Marie's description to what happened to the fate of the relation and the unshared horror it brought to her life.

As per the narrator, Claire Marie is a sensitive human being, easy to be a prey of mind games and tragic/romantic stories—which she collected from Marc Hermann's story of his Hungarian past. The narrator too is influenced by her sister, the way she feels the internal disquiet4 and dissatisfaction as if transferred from her sister. Something from the past influences them, something about the present unsettles5 them.

3.       Life’s like that: you make a valiant effort to carry your dreams, yours or those of others.

4.       That was why I resented my sister. That’s what’s so irritating about her. She rattles you.

5.       It was a remnant of childhood, I knew it. Our life with Rochester—my sister’s and mine—isn’t acceptable to anyone; our childhood isn’t acceptable to anyone. It weighs on us. But we can’t manage to get rid of it. It makes us exiles. I’ve tried to conceal it, I try to bluff. I try to appear liberated and modern (not an easy goal to accomplish, you have to admit, given the heavy burden of our upbringing on my sister and me). I’ve tried with all my strength to adjust.

The animated6 description of the stillness of the landscape in the narration is as such everything takes on life: the houses, the forest, the pond, the train stations… even the suspenseful rumors that circulate in the suburb about a strange man roaming in the locality.  In this recollection, we find a subtle psychological horror, a sisterly care7 and bond, strangeness of human emotion, imagined influences, a sensitive soul, a haunting echo of the childhood, nerves of loneliness, need for happiness and love… we are uplifted when things settle in the end. A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray fills us with hundreds of images to remember!

6. A damp autumn set in. You have to know what autumn’s like in Ville-d’Avray. October. November. In the hundreds of terraced gardens that rose in tiers up the slopes of the hills, the plants were turning brown, the trees were shedding their leaves. The rain started in the morning, stopped around noon, and resumed toward evening. The neighborhood seemed dead, the gardens perpetually darkened by the showers; the slate roofs glistened; the sodden leaves macerated in heaps. As soon as night fell, the wet asphalt reflected extensive yellow crowns of yet unfallen leaves. The same ruined, melancholy prospect was reproduced on every street, one by one. People went out less.

7.       I could practically see my sister strolling with her stranger in a setting composed of reflections, of beautiful trees, of leaves speckled with tiny light-colored patches, like eye floaters, as if the blurriness of dreams interposed itself between the image and the beholder (which is always the case with Corot)… I felt anger toward that man. Because he took advantage of the situation; because he understood nothing about my sister.


Author: Dominique Barbéris

Translator: John Cullen

Publisher: Other Press

Author's Photo Source: Maurice Rougemont

Review Copy Courtesy: Other Press