“Sea of Fertility” by Bella Han, translated from the Chinese by the author (Clarkesworld, August 1)

Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa (NYRB, August 5)

Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez’s own Buenos Aires, Orsini—who now knows his Freud and has read Lolita—looks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life.

The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran, translated from the Korean by Gene Png (Bloomsbury Publishing, August 12)

When four isolated elderly people die back-to-back at the same hospital by jumping out of the sixth-floor window, Su-Yeon doesn’t understand why she’s the only one at her precinct that seems to care. But her colleagues at the police force dismiss the case as a series of unfortunate suicides due to the patients’ loneliness. But Su-Yeon doesn’t have the privilege of looking away: her dearest friend, Grandma Eun-Shim, lives on the sixth floor, and Su-Yeon is terrified that something will happen to her next. As Su-Yeon begins her investigation alone, she runs into a mysterious woman named Violette at the crime scene. Violette claims to be a vampire hunter, searching for her ex-lover, Lily, and is insistent that a vampire is behind the mysterious deaths. Su-Yeon is skeptical at first, but when a fifth victim jumps from the window, her investigation reveals the body was completely drained of blood. Desperate to discover the cause of the deaths, Su-Yeon considers Violette’s explanation-that something supernatural is involved.

Yankees in Petrograd by Marietta S. Shaginyan, translated from the Russian by Jill Roese (MIT Press, August 19)

When a capitalist cabal plots to assassinate Lenin, can quick-witted American workers ride to the rescue before it’s too late?—a new translation. In Yankees in Petrograd, the Russian author Marietta S. Shaginyan (writing under the American nom de plume Jim Dollar) gives us a riveting crime and espionage adventure with science fiction elements. Despite having awesome technologies such as public transportation that bends space and time and electrical forcefields protecting Soviet Russia against its foes, the world’s first proletarian state is threatened by a fascist organization that will stop at nothing—including kidnapping, mesmerism, and infiltration—to assassinate Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Communist leaders! Enter Mike Thingsmaster, American tradesman and leader of a secret global organization defending the interests of the proletariat, who tasks his network with foiling this nefarious plot.

We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega (Yale UP, August 19)

In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon‑Perse finds himself in possession of one of the most promising inventions of the century: a computer. Enchanted by snippets of Persian poetry he learns from his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail, Jon-Perse builds a computer program capable of both analyzing and generating literature. But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds—of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love—in the stories and people he and AI conjure.

Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tejima (Scribner, August 26)

When a young woman from Tokyo contacts the go-between to request a meeting with a deceased TV star who once helped her, she doesn’t expect a teenage boy to show up. Dressed in a designer duffel coat and carrying a tattered notebook, Ayumi Shibuya offers an extraordinary service: he reunites the living with their dearly departed. Meeting his clients at a luxury hotel, Ayumi lays down the ground rules: each reunion is a one-time arrangement that the dead can refuse, the service is entirely free, and the meeting must take place during a full moon. As Ayumi arranges these reunions, we encounter a resentful eldest son who wants to ask his mother to unearth the deeds to a plot of land, a teenage girl who blames herself for her best friend’s death, and a weary businessman seeking answers about his fiancée’s disappearance days after he proposed.

Restoration by Ave Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers (Charco Press, August 26)

Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong. Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room – scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks – the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room? Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what’s behind our own barred door.