Read the World: Celebrate Women in Translation Month
August is Women in Translation Month, a time to champion brilliant international female authors and the talented translators who bring their stories to English-speaking readers.
From mind-bending South Korean sci-fi to sweeping Spanish feminist fiction, here are five extraordinary translated titles to add to your TBR pile this month.
From an author never before published in the United States, Cursed Bunny is unique and imaginative, blending horror, sci-fi, fairy tales, and speculative fiction into stories that defy categorization. By turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning, here monsters take the shapes of furry woodland creatures and danger lurks in unexpected corners of everyday apartment buildings. But in this unforgettable collection, translated by the acclaimed Anton Hur, Chung’s absurd, haunting universe could be our own.
“The Head” follows a woman haunted by her own bodily waste. “The Embodiment” takes us into a dystopian gynecology office where a pregnant woman is told that she must find a father for her baby or face horrific consequences. Another story follows a young monster, forced into underground fight rings without knowing his own power. The titular fable centers on a cursed lamp in the shape of a rabbit, fit for a child’s bedroom but for its sinister capabilities.
No two stories are alike, and readers will be torn whether to race through them or savor Chung’s wit and frenetic energy on every page. Cursed Bunny is a book that screams to be read late into the night and passed on to the nearest set of hands the very next day.
“Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Aoko Matsuda, Chung’s stories are so wonderfully, blisteringly strange and powerful that it’s almost impossible to put Cursed Bunny down.” ―Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble
Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in Translated Literature
After breaking down at the office and abruptly quitting her job, thirty-year-old Jungmin holes up in her apartment, speaking to no one for days on end. When she finally emerges, she stumbles upon a pottery studio in her neighborhood and is invited in by the mysterious workshop teacher. The smell of clay, the light filtering through the plant filled windows, the friendly cat, and the incredible coffee the students drink awaken her senses and make her feel alive and inspired for the first time in months.
As the seasons change, Jungmin slowly returns to herself and builds a new community with the other members of the studio, who are all working through their own pasts at the pottery wheel. When the holidays approach and snow piles up on the studio windowsill, Jungmin realizes how much she has changed—with her hands busy and her mind clear, she may be ready to face the memories she’s been running from and open her heart.
For fans of What You Are Looking For Is in the Library and Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, Yeon’s charming English-language debut is a testament to the joy of slowing down in a fast-paced world, and an homage to the art of ceramics and the power of friendship. Readers won’t want to leave the enchanting world of The Healing Season of Pottery after the final page.
From the acclaimed author and translator of the National Book Award Finalist, Cursed Bunny, a fresh, uncanny, and utterly profound collection of stories set in near and distant futures that reflect our deepest fears—and deepest desires.
Bora Chung’s inimitable blend of horror, absurdity, and dark humor reaches its peak in these tales of loss and discovery, dystopia and idealism, death and immortality. In a thrilling translation by the acclaimed Anton Hur, readers will experience a variety of possible fates for humanity, from total demise via a disease whose only symptom is casual cannibalism to a world in which even dreams can be monitored and used to convict people of crimes.
In “The Center for Immortality Research,” a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors only to be blamed for the chaos that ensues during the event in front of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. In “A Song for Sleep,” an AI elevator in an apartment complex develops a tender, one-sided love for an elderly resident. “Seed” traverses the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet—but nature always creeps back to life.
If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of Chung’s singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.
One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction of 2024
“Chung builds out her stories with imagination, absurdity and a dry sense of humor, all applied with X-Acto knife precision.” ―Alexandra Kleeman, The New York Times Book Review
Bora Chung’s inimitable blend of horror, absurdity, and dark humor reaches its peak in these tales of loss and discovery, dystopia and idealism, death and immortality. In a thrilling translation by the acclaimed Anton Hur, readers will experience a variety of possible fates for humanity, from total demise via a disease whose only symptom is casual cannibalism to a world in which even dreams can be monitored and used to convict people of crimes.
In “The Center for Immortality Research,” a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors only to be blamed for the chaos that ensues during the event in front of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. In “A Song for Sleep,” an AI elevator in an apartment complex develops a tender, one-sided love for an elderly resident. “Seed” traverses the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet—but nature always creeps back to life.
If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of Chung’s singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.
One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction of 2024
“Chung builds out her stories with imagination, absurdity and a dry sense of humor, all applied with X-Acto knife precision.” ―Alexandra Kleeman, The New York Times Book Review
Winner of the Francisco Umbral Prize for Best Book of the Year
A Finalist for the Finestres Award
Now Translated into Fifteen Languages
An international sensation, The Wonders follows María and Alicia through the streets of Madrid as they search for meaning and stability in a precarious world and unknowingly trace each other’s footfalls across time. María moved to the city in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family but hoping to save enough to take care of her. She worked as a housekeeper, then a caregiver, and later a cleaner, and somehow she was always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in Madrid’s Atocha train station when it overflowed with female protesters. She couldn’t have known that María was among them. Alicia didn’t have time for marches; she was just trying to hang on until the end of her shift.
Readers will fall in love with María and Alicia, whose stories finally converge in the chaos of the protests, the weight of the years of silence hanging thickly in the air between them. The Wonders brings half a century of the feminist movement to life, and launches an inimitable new voice in fiction. Medel’s lyrical sensibility reveals her roots as a poet, but her fast-paced and expansive storytelling show she’s a novelist ahead of her time.
Mira is a desperate young woman, hired by a wealthy single mother to tutor her lonesome son, Yuchan. But Mira is not who she presents herself to be; she is haunted by the death of her own family and motivated by the dark pulse of vengeance. Yuchan was cruel to Mira’s mother. A kind of cruelty she can’t ever forgive.
And then there is Jiwon, the boy’s mother, a bad mother, Mira thinks—or so Jiwon tells herself she must not be.
But as Mira spends more time in the family’s sprawling home, she begins to suspect Yuchan is not the culprit she’s after. Someone else in the family has been pulling the strings. Someone with a deviant plan she can’t begin to imagine.
Structured around four different letters and journal entries: Mira’s, Jiwon’s reply, Yuchan’s younger brother’s diary entry and, finally, Mira’s own written recollection. Each new section brings us deeper into a web of cruelty, consequence, and closer to the truth.