❃ NEXT MEETING: JANUARY 9TH, 7PM, DISCUSSING STILL BORN BY GUADALUPE NETTEL. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!
❃ NEXT MEETING: JANUARY 9TH, 7PM, DISCUSSING STILL BORN BY GUADALUPE NETTEL. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!
❃ NEXT MEETING: JANUARY 9TH, 7PM, DISCUSSING STILL BORN BY GUADALUPE NETTEL. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!
❃ NEXT MEETING: JANUARY 9TH, 7PM, DISCUSSING STILL BORN BY GUADALUPE NETTEL. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!
❃ NEXT MEETING: JANUARY 9TH, 7PM, DISCUSSING STILL BORN BY GUADALUPE NETTEL. BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!
Dec. 2024
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century
Olga Ravn (Author)
Martin Aitken (Translator)
The Employees chronicles the fate of the interstellar Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Bookshop.org
Nov. 2024
The Twilight Zone
Nona Fernández (Author)
Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.
Bookshop.org
Oct. 2024
Disoriental
Négar Djavadi (Author)
Tina Kover (Translator)
Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself, as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her.
Bookshop.org
Aug. 2024
Dogs of Summer
Andrea Abreu (Author)
Julia Sanches (Translator)
High near the volcano of northern Tenerife, an endless ceiling of cloud cover traps the working class in an oppressive heat. It's summer, 2005, and our ten-year-old narrator is consumed by thoughts of her best friend Isora. She would do anything for Isora: gorge herself on cakes when her friend wants to watch, follow her to the bathroom, log into chat rooms to swap dirty instant messages with strangers. But increasingly, our narrator finds it hard to keep up with Isora, and her submissiveness veers into a painful sexual awakening.
Bookshop.org
Jul. 2024
Minor Detail
Adania Shibli (Author)
Elisabeth Jaquette (Translator)
Minor Detail begins one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba--the catastrophe that led to the displacement of some 700,000 people. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this crime, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession.
Bookshop.org
Jun. 2024
The Summer Book
Tove Jansson (Author)
Thomas Teal (Translator)
This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love.
Bookshop.org
May 2024
All Men Want to Know
Nina Bouraoui (Author)
Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Translator)
In All Men Want to Know, the author traces her blissful childhood in Algeria, a sun-soaked paradise. But Nina's mother is French, and as civil war approaches, their sunny idyll gives way to increasingly hostile and violent outbreaks. When something unspeakable happens to her mother, the family flee to Paris. In Paris, Nina lives alone. She is eighteen years old. It's the 1980s. Four nights a week she walks across Paris to a legendary women-only nightclub, the Katmandou.
Bookshop.org
Apr. 2024
Crooked Plow
Itamar Vieira Junior (Author)
Johnny Lorenz (Translator)
Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. This gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath.
Bookshop.org
Mar. 2024
Ghachar Ghochar
Vivek Shanbhag (Author)
Srinath Perur (Translator)
A young man's close-knit family is nearly destitute when his uncle founds a successful spice company, changing their fortunes overnight. As they move from a cramped, ant-infested shack to a larger house on the other side of Bangalore, and try to adjust to a new way of life, the family dynamic begins to shift. Allegiances realign; marriages are arranged; and conflict brews ominously in the background. Things become "ghachar ghochar"--a nonsense phrase uttered by one meaning something tangled beyond repair.
Bookshop.org
Feb. 2024
Woman at Point Zero
Nawal El Saadawi (Author)
Sherif Hetata (Translator)
Firdaus is on death row. Her crime, the murder of a man. Born into poverty in a rural Egyptian village, her childhood dreams and ambitions had been met with neglect and abuse by the world and the men who rule it. Driven to sex work to support herself, she is faced with the moral outrage of society and the bitter knowledge that for a woman, true freedom comes only when all hope is abandoned.
Bookshop.org
Jan. 2024
Winter in Sokcho
Elisa Shua Dusapin (Author)
Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Translator)
It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an "authentic" Korea, but he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows--the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works
Bookshop.org
Dec. 2023
Elena Knows
Claudia Piñeiro (Author)
Frances Riddle (Translator)
After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.
Bookshop.org
Nov. 2023
Death and the Penguin
Andrey Kurkov (Author)
George Bird (Translator)
In poverty-and-violence-wracked Kyiv, unemployed writer Viktor Zolotaryov leads a down-and-out life with his only friend, Misha, a penguin that he rescued when the local zoo started getting rid of animals it couldn't feed. Viktor thinks he's finally caught a break when he lands a well-paying job at the Kyiv newspaper writing "living obituaries" of local dignitaries--articles to be filed for use when the time comes. The only thing is, the time always seems to come as soon as Viktor finishes writing the article.
Bookshop.org
Oct. 2023
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi (Author)
Jonathan Wright (Translator)
From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi--a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café--collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed.
Bookshop.org
Sept. 2023
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture
Apostolos Doxiades
Petros Papachristos, a mathematical prodigy, has devoted much of his life trying to prove one of the greatest mathematical challenges of all Goldbach's Conjecture, the deceptively simple claim that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes. His feverish and singular pursuit of this goal has come to define his life. Now an old man, he is looked on with suspicion and shame by his family-until his ambitious young nephew intervenes.
Goodreads
Aug. 2023
At Night All Blood is Black
David Diop (Author)
Anna Moschovakis (Translator)
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a "Chocolat" soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop is fatally injured in battle, Alfa Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier.
Bookshop.org
Jul. 2023
Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor (Author)
Sophie Hughes (Translator)
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters--inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable--forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
Bookshop.org
Jun. 2023
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk (Author)
Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator)
In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances.
Bookshop.org
May 2023
Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto (Author)
Megan Backus (Translator)
Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the comforts of food at its heart.
Bookshop.org
Apr. 2023
Notes of a Crocodile
Qiu Miaojin (Author)
Bonnie Huie (Translator)
Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by a major countercultural figure. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her slacker artist girlfriend.
Bookshop.org
Mar. 2023
I Who Have Never Known Men
Jacqueline Harpman (Author)
Ros Schwartz (Translator)
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Bookshop.org
Feb. 2023
Tender is the Flesh
Agustina Bazterrica (Author)
Sarah Moses (Translator)
Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore.His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition." Now, eating human meat--"special meat"--is legal.
Bookshop.org
Jan. 2023
Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih (Author)
Denys Johnson-Davies (Translator)
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood--the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his career as an economist, and of the series of deadly relationships with European women that led to a public reckoning and his return to Sudan.
Bookshop.org
Dec. 2022
My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante (Author)
Ann Goldstein (Translator)
Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante's four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as kids through their school years and adolescence.
Bookshop.org
Oct. 2022
Almond
Won-Pyung Sohn (Author)
Sandy Joosun Lee (Translator)
Yunjae was born with a brain condition called Alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotions. He does not have friends, but his devoted mother and grandmother provide him with a safe and content life. Then, a shocking act of random violence shatters his world, leaving him alone and on his own. Struggling to cope with his loss, Yunjae retreats into silent isolation, until troubled teenager Gon arrives at his school, and they develop a surprising bond.
Bookshop.org