Books
India Lewis
The title of Katya Adaui’s debut collection in English is taken from one of the 12 short stories it contains: an allusion to the depths hidden below the surface, which is also one of the book’s central motifs.Adaui is the Peruvian author of three books of short stories and a novel, who now lives in Buenos Aires. Here Be Icebergs, translated by Rosalind Harvey, is an elegant, slim volume, which, despite its size, manages to capture the enormity and complexity of familial and personal ties.The opener, “The Hunger Angel”, is an excellent depiction of how we can merge into our family whilst Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian writer who came in from the cold. Until the spring of 2014, he was an aspiring poet and novelist based in the eastern Donbas region: when, however, its main city and surrounding area fell under the control of pro-Russian militants, he began to document the alternative reality of life in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).Now collected and translated into English by Lidia Wolandskyji, his dispatches (written for the Mirror Weekly newspaper under the pen name Stanislav Vasin) provide a fascinating insight into the culture war at the heart of the fight Read more ...
Izzy Smith
Mieko Kawakami is the champion of the loner. Since achieving immense success in the UK with her translated works, she has become an indie fiction icon for her modern, visceral depictions of characters who exist on the fringes of Japanese society. Kawakami’s latest novel to be translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd not only cements her reputation for giving voice to the quieter souls of this world, but also sees the intimacy of her writing reach new heights.All the Lovers in the Night is one of those novels that hangs together so delicately that it’s difficult to discern its Read more ...
Jon Turney
Years ago, one of the leading mathematicians in the country tried to explain to me what his real work was like. When he was on the case, he said, he could be doing a range of other things – having his morning shave, making coffee, walking to a meeting – but all the time, “I am holding the problem in my mind”.Which didn’t help much. I did once know how to do some maths, but still had little idea what he meant. Where in the mind is a problem held? What holds it? Does the metaphor extend to putting it down and picking it up again, to examine it from a different angle? I have about as much notion Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“Is she at a pivotal point in her life but unable to pivot…?” Eve, the young heroine of Chloë Ashby’s dazzling debut novel, Wet Paint, asks this question standing in front of Édouard Manet’s painting "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882). Yet she could easily be asking herself the same question.Unable to “pivot” in life, but at a pivotal stage, Eve goes from job to job, is thrown out of her flat, becomes increasingly reckless and then spirals downwards in an effort to stave off the memories of the past. Initially, art – the viewing and co-creation of it – keeps her afloat, but past traumas Read more ...
Rojbîn Arjen Yigit
In this best-selling Korean novella, recently translated into English by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin offers us the perspective of a Korean mother. It’s narrated entirely from the perspective of a woman of around 60 who has a daughter in her thirties and focuses on her inability to understand what her daughter, Green, wants from life and why she’s decided to live openly as a lesbian with her partner Lane: “Gay? The word rushes into my head and shoots through without permission. Words come to me so violently, without warning, before Lane can say another word, I quickly manage to correct her. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“I suppose you’re going to ask all the usual questions...?” When Keith Jarrett was interviewed by Alyn Shipton for the very first time, the pianist, who could often be tetchy in such situations, clearly had low expectations. Deftly, Shipton asked him what it had been like to play the baroque organ in the abbey at Ottobeuren for the recording of Hymns/Spheres for ECM in 1976. “His eyes lit up,” Shipton remembers. “[He told] me how he had been ‘immediately lost in its world of sound’... and we were away...”This anecdote – which is not in the book On Jazz - A Personal Journey itself, but in an Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Scrolling to the top of my Twitter DMs, most of which are from close friends or acquaintances, I notice the message request section flash “1”. It’s a signal I usually ignore, having learnt from past mistakes that what ends up in this screened-off section isn’t, as Twitter’s privacy settings rightly intuit, worth my attention.This time, however, I press on the notification, see the message and laugh. “Hi you are so beatifoul” the request reads alongside a small profile pic of a pale, sour-faced-looking male. Laughter turns to cackling (the LMAO-kind) much to the annoyance of those around me, Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Laura Beatty is a kind of Shirley Valentine figure in contemporary English literature. A decade and a half ago she published an astonishing debut novel entitled Pollard about female emancipation from the strictures of English life. In that story her escapist heroine falls in love with – and in – Salcey Forest, whose mysteries (and voices) Beatty captures with marvellous poetic skill. She returned to this subject – Englishness and its feminine discontents – in her second novel Darkling (2014), which juxtaposes a fictional love affair with the real-life history of a Puritan woman during the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Emily St John Mandel’s wonderful novel of 2020, The Glass Hotel, featured people and places from her previous pandemic-themed blockbuster, the brilliant Station Eleven.In Sea of Tranquility, named after the "silent flatlands" on the moon where the Apollo astronauts landed, the small settlement of Caiette on Vancouver Island is a crucial reference point from The Glass Hotel. And several characters – Vincent, Mirella, and Jonathan Alkaitis, the Madoff-style Ponzi-scheme villain of the previous novel – all rear their heads, some of them, like Alkaitis, living in the alternative timelines posited Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
To read Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir, The Barefoot Woman, beautifully translated from the French by Jordan Stump, is to see simultaneously through the eyes of a woman and a child.The mother, the industrious and ingenious Stefania, watches her children attentively, preparing them for any possible danger that might assail them in or out of the home. Her daughter, the young Mukasonga, is the faithful storyteller of her mama’s one-time magical griot, whose loving and ever-watchful gaze, much like her narrative, never strays from the resilient and resourceful mother before her. Their entwined Read more ...
Daniel Hahn
Daniel Hahn began his translation of Jamás el fuego nunca, a novel by experimental Chilean artist Diamela Eltit, in January 2021. Considering the careful, difficult but not impossible “craft” of translation as he worked, Hahn kept a diary, describing the “discrete choices” made during the process of writing Never Did the Fire: an English version of Eltit’s original with Hahn’s “fingerprints” all over it.A record in real time of the translator’s pleasures and pitfalls, the diary is the first in Charco’s Untranslated Series. In the extract below, Hahn discusses how gender is encoded differently Read more ...