Translated OKC Upcoming Picks

Nov. 13th, 7pm

The Wall

Marlen Haushofer (Author)
Shaun Whiteside (Translator)

While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness.

Jan. 8th, 7pm

The Door

Magda Szabo (Author)
Len Rix (Translator)

An unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda’s housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda’s household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda.

Feb. 12th, 7pm

The Book of Disappearance

Ibtisam Azem (Author)
Sinan Antoon (Translator)

What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories.

March 12th, 7pm (Tentative)

Crocodiles at Night

Gisela Heffes (Author)
Grady Wray (Translator)

Crocodiles at Night follows the difficult journey of death through the eyes of a woman as she travels between her home in Houston and her ailing father in Argentina. It explores familial ties, memories and images of places that are no longer the same, the vagaries of the medical system, and social critique in this unfeigned, excruciating view of death and how it affects all who experience it.

Apr. 9th, 7pm

Bad Girls

Camila Villada (Author)
Kit Maude (Translator)

In Sarmiento Park, the green heart of Córdoba, a group of trans sex workers make their nightly rounds. When a cry comes from the dark, their leader, the 178-year-old Auntie Encarna, wades into the brambles to investigate and discovers a baby half dead from the cold. She quickly rallies the pack to save him, and they adopt the child into their fascinating surrogate family as they have so many other outcasts, including Camila.

May 14th, 7pm

The Three-Body Problem

Cixin Liu (Author)
Ken Liu (Translator)

Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

June 11th, 7pm

Our Lady of the Nile

Scholastique Mukasonga (Author)
Melanie Mauthner (Translator)

Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile, an elite Catholic boarding school for young women, to be molded into respectable citizens and to escape the dangers of the outside world. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we watch as these girls try on their parents’ preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country’s mounting racial tensions and violence. With masterful prose that is at once subtle and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society hurtling towards horror.