The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories by Dino Buzzati, translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti (NYRB, January 7).
In The Bewitched Bourgeois, Lawrence Venuti has put together an anthology that showcases Buzzati’s short fiction from his earliest stories to the ones he wrote in the last months of his life. Some appear in English for the first time, while others are reappearing in Venuti’s crisp new versions, such as the much-anthologized “Seven Floors,” an absurdist tale of a patient fatally caught in hospital bureaucracy; “Panic at La Scala,” in which the Milanese bourgeoisie, fearing a left-wing revolution, find themselves imprisoned in the opera house; and “Appointment with Einstein,” where the physicist, stopping at a filling station in Princeton, New Jersey, encounters a gas station attendant who turns out to be the Angel of Death.
Dead Souls (Hospital #3) by Han Song, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (Amazon Crossing, January 7)
From acclaimed author Han Song comes the final installment in Yang Wei’s journey through a dystopian hospital system, touching down on the red planet, where more than Yang’s nightmare is reborn. The Hospital Ship is no more, and Yang Wei awakens to find himself at the mercy of monstrous doctors and the tumult of his own mind. Not helping matters, of course, is the Mars Hospital’s Pool of Dead Souls. A ghastly body of water, it traps people in an endless cycle of treatment, death, and resurrection.
Strange Pictures by Uketsu, translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion (HarperVia, January 14).
The spine-tingling “triumphant international debut” (Publishers Weekly starred review) that has taken Japan by storm—an eerie fresh take on mystery-horror in which a series of seemingly innocent pictures draws you into a disturbing web of unsolved mysteries and shattered psyches.
The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim, translated from the Korean by Sean Lin Halbert (MIRA, February 4).
The object was a black orb, roughly two meters in diameter. Despite its large size, it made no sound as it moved. Although it wasn’t chasing Jeong-su fast enough to catch him, it was unrelenting and persistent in its pursuit…One evening in downtown Seoul, Jeong-su is smoking a cigarette outside when he sees something impossible: a huge black orb appears out of nowhere and sucks his neighbor inside. Jeong-su manages to get away, but the terrifying sphere can move through walls, so he’s sure he won’t be able to hide for long. The orb soon begins consuming every person caught in its path, and no one knows how to stop it. Impervious to bullets and tanks, the orb splits and multiplies, chasing the hapless residents of Seoul out into the country and sparking a global crisis with widespread violence and looting. Jeong-su must rely on his wits as he makes the arduous journey in search of his elderly parents. But the strangest phases of this ever-expanding disaster are yet to come and Jeong-su will be forced to question everything he has taken for granted.
Adam and Eve in Paradise by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, tr from the Portuguese (Portugal) by Margaret Jull Costa (New Directions, February 4)
Gloriously translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise is not the rosy prelapsarian tale of your childhood Bible: yellow-eyed Adam is a slope-browed Neanderthal all alone and panicked, and Paradise is abominable (seethingly alive with vicious insects and roving primordial carnivores). Luckily for Adam, Eve appears… But still we must pity poor Adam and Eve: “Our Parents’ tireless, desperate efforts were devoted entirely to surviving in the midst of a Nature that was ceaselessly, furiously plotting their destruction. And Adam and Eve spent those days—which Semitic texts celebrate as delightful—always trembling, always whimpering, always fleeing!”
The Fake Muse by Max Besora, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Open Letter, February 18)
Infused with the spirit of pulp fiction, b-movies, zines, and punk rock, The Fake Muse is a linguistic tour-de-force from the author of The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia. The book opens by introducing us, one by one, to an array of troubled characters, each with their own typographical voice. There’s Johnny (an Aries) who turns into a vampire at a showing of Nosferatu, there’s Meritxell (a Leo) who falls in love with a giant mutant hamster-philosopher, Josep (Cancer) who is also known as the “King Kong of the Bronx,” and Amanda aka Maryjane (Scorpio) who has had it with the abuse she’s suffered at the hands of the . . . author, Max Besora (Aquarius), and who is ready to take whatever action necessary.
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish (Argentina) by Sarah Moses (Scribner, March 4).
The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus (Deep Vellum, March 4).
Winner of the 2024 Albertine Translation Prize
The metaphysically disorienting tale of a female captain who loses control of her thinking—and her crew—aboard a cargo ship in the Atlantic.
A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire, translated from the Spanish (Ecuador) by Victor Meadowcroft (World Editions, April 1).
Cocuán, a desolate town nestled between the hot jungle and the frigid Andes, is about to slip away from memory. This is where Mildred was born, and where everything she had—her animals, her home, her lands—was taken from her after her mother’s death. Years later, a series of strange events, disappearances, and outbursts of collective delirium will force its residents to reckon with the legend of old Mildred. Once again, they will feel the shadow of death that has hung over the town ever since she was wronged. The voices of nine characters—Mildred, Ezequiel, Agustina, Manzi, Carmen, Víctor, Baltasar, Hermosina, and Filatelio—tell us of the past and present of that doomed place and Mildred’s fate. Natalia García Freire’s vivid language blurs the lines between dreams and reality and transports the reader to the hypnotic Andean universe of Ecuador.
Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Press, April 15)
From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.
Red Sword by Bora Chung, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (Honford Star, May 13).
Red Sword is the mesmerizing and haunting English-language debut novel by International Booker Prize-shortlisted author Bora Chung. Expertly translated by Anton Hur, this speculative fiction unfolds on a distant, war-ravaged planet where advanced technologies wreak havoc and devastation. Told in sparse, evocative prose, a slave-turned-reluctant hero must traverse the alien terrain to uncover the truth about her identity and that of her enslaved companions. Characteristically borrowing from a plethora of genres, Red Sword blends a poignant exploration of social relations with stunning world-building, and challenges readers to consider what it means to wield power over others
The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar, unknown translator (Europa Editions, May 6).
Spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, this lush, layered story embraces politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love as it recounts the colorful destinies of twelve children who get lost one long-ago night inside a mysterious palace.
School of Shards by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko, translated from the Russian by Julia Meitov Hersey (Harper Voyager, June 17).
The haunting final chapter of the modern classic Vita Nostra trilogy. The Dyachenkos’ magical dark academia novel brings the story of Sasha to a revelatory climax as she learns to take control of her powers and reshape the world…or destroy it forever.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf Press, June 17)
Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, and demons. In a remote farmhouse called Mas Clavell, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed. Family and caretakers drift in and out. Meanwhile, all the women who have lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party. As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of stories unspool, and the house reverberates with raucous laughter, pungent feasts, and piercing cries of pleasure and pain. It all begins with Joana, Mas Clavell’s matriarch, who once longed for a husband—“a full man,” perhaps even “an heir with a patch of land and a roof over his head.” She summoned the devil to fulfill her wish and struck a deal: a man in exchange for her soul. But when, on her wedding day, Joana discovered that her husband was missing a toe (eaten by wolves), she exploited a loophole in her agreement, heedless of what consequences might follow.
New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel by Wu Jianren, translated from the Chinese by Liz Evans Weber (Columbia University Press, June 24)
One of China’s first works of science fiction, New Story of the Stone is a belated twentieth-century sequel to the beloved eighteenth-century masterpiece Story of the Stone (more famously known as Dream of the Red Chamber). The story follows protagonist Jia Baoyu, borrowed from the original Story, as he is dramatically hurled forward over a hundred years from his own time into a bewildering future: first the decadent semicolonized late Qing China of the author’s own time and later an astonishing high-tech Confucian utopia called the Realm of Civilization.
Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz, translated from the French (Switzerland) by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (New Directions, July 1)
It’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town—both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date—when a “great message,” telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an “accident in the gravitational system.” Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth that will send our planet plunging into the sun: it’s the end of the world, though one hardly notices it, yet … “Thus all life will come to an end. The heat will rise. It will be excruciating for all living things … And yet nothing is visible for the moment.” For now the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine har vest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, and the sun turns from orange-red to red, and then to black-red. First comes denial: “The news is from America, you know what that means.” Then come first farewells: counting and naming beloved things—the rectangular meadows, the grapes on the vines, the lake. In its beauty the world is saying, “Look at me,” before it ends.
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.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (New Directions, September 2)
In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man and gives them dark powers: they can steal people’s happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or even death. They are all in danger of the stake. The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.
Archipelago of the Sun (#3) by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions, September 2)
Archipelago of the Sun finds Hiruko still searching for her lost country, traveling around the Baltic on a mail boat. With her are Knut, a Danish linguist; Akash, an Indian in the process of moving to the opposite sex; Nanook, a Greenlander who once worked as a sushi chef; Nora, the German woman who loves Nanook but is equally concerned with social justice and the environment; and Susanoo, a former sushi chef who believes he is responsible for the entire group. But weren’t they originally supposed to sail to Cape Town, and then on to India? Puzzled by this sudden change in route, which no one seems to remember anything about, they encounter long dead writers (Witold Gombrowicz, Hella Wuolijoki) on board, plus a cast of characters from literature, art, and myth. As the very existence of Hiruko and Susanoo’s homeland is called into question, Susanoo meets the mythical princess he will marry, and Hiruko tells the others that she will now be a house in which everyone can live. Though the trilogy comes to its end, their journey seems likely to continue.
The Collected Short Stories by Cixin Liu, various translators (Head of Zeus, September 11)
The collected short stories of Cixin Liu, author of The Three Body Problem trilogy. The collection will comprise stories from The Wandering Earth, To Hold Up the Sky, and Of Ants and Dinosaurs.
The New Eve by Moussa Ould Ebnou, translated from the French and Arabic by Paul Roochnik (Iskanchi Press, September 15)
The New Eve is an exploration of love, identity, and resistance in a society where emotional connections are seen as a disease. In a future where human reproduction is controlled by technology and gender roles are policed by a totalitarian society, Adam and Maneki forge a forbidden connection that transcends their world’s rigid structures. As their journey unfolds, they uncover the hidden costs of their society’s technological advancements: gender segregation, the criminalization of love, and the suppression of individuality. Amidst the rigid enforcement of heterosexual norms, they encounter androgynes who defy binary categories, opening the door to a broader understanding of identity, desire, and self-expression. The New Eve tackles questions about gender fluidity, the ethics of technological progress, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Castigation by Sultan Raev, translated from the Kyrgyz by Shelley Fairweather-Vega (Syracuse University Press, September 15)
Seven escaped mental patients—including reincarnations of Genghis Khan, Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great—trudge across a nameless landscape, pursued by an omnipresent snake and haunted by their past lives’ brutal transgressions. Led by a mysterious Emperor who promises deliverance to the Holy Land, these travelers are actually pilgrims of their own fractured histories, each confronting the violent, sensual, and deeply human moments that have defined their existence. Blending elements of Central Asian epic tradition with surrealist storytelling, Sultan Raev crafts a novel that is at once a scathing critique of power, a meditation on historical violence, and a darkly comic exploration of collective memory.
Dinner at the Night Library by Hika Harada, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Hanover Square Press, September 30)
A whimsical, charming novel about a mysterious library in Tokyo that opens after dark, following the employees who bond each night over special meals inspired by the books on the shelves
Black Hole Heart and Other Stories by K. A. Teryna, translated from the Russian by Alex Shvartsman (Fairwood Press, October)
The world is not how we perceive it. A blizzard may be the fury of a whale god. Intelligent bees watch our every move. Monsters lurk in the metro underpasses while others haunt our dreams. Are we asleep in frozen sarcophagi, en route to a new planet? Should we swallow jellyfish, drink colors, or repaint the sky? This book has the answers. But in return, it might steal your heart. Black Hole Heart and Other Stories contains 13 speculative tales by the award-winning author and illustrator K.A. Teryna, translated from Russian.
Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated by ? (Harper, October 21)
In Lock Haven, a quiet little town in Washington State, there is a very special street. Bird Street. The residents of Bird Street are all successful, wealthy, healthy and happy. And their children are all well-mannered and smart and high achievers. At least they are for eleven months of the year. In November, however, the ‘Darker Days’ begin. For November’s the month when things take a turn for the worse: accidents, bad luck, familial conflict and illness take hold. And it is in November that a stranger comes to Bird Street to collect the debt owed by the residents. Because, you see, there is a price that must be paid for all the happiness and good fortune they enjoy for the other eleven months of year. And that price is one human life. Every November. Without fail.
On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions, November 18)
In the marvelous third installment of Balle’s “astonishing” (The Washington Post) septology, Tara’s November 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay.” Where Book I and II focused on a single woman’s involuntary journey away from her life and her loved ones and into the chasm of time, Book III brings us back into the realm of companionship, with all its thrills, odd quirks, and a sense of mutual bewilderment at having to relearn how to exist alongside others in a shared reality. And then of course, what of Tara’s husband Thomas, still sitting alone day after day, entirely unawares, in their house in Clarion-sous-Bois, waiting for his wife to return? Blending poetry and philosophical inquiry with rich reflections on our discombobulating times, Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume asks us to consider: What is a single person’s responsibility to humanity and to the preservation of this world?
On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions, November 18)
We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, and people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara’s notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one—not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day—could have foreseen.
