Narrow Road to the Interior

Here is the most complete single-volume collection of the writings of one of the great luminaries of Asian literature. Basho (1644–1694)—who elevated the haiku to an art form of utter simplicity and intense spiritual beauty—is best known in the West as the author of Narrow Road to the Interior, a travel diary of linked prose and haiku that recounts his journey through the far northern provinces of Japan. This volume includes a masterful translation of this celebrated work along with three other less well-known but important works by Basho: Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones, The Knapsack Notebook, and Sarashina Travelogue. There is also a selection of over two hundred fifty of Basho's finest haiku. In addition, the translator has provided an introduction detailing Basho's life and work and an essay on the art of haiku.

Note: A variety of different translations are available with this version translated by Sam Hamill recommended as the best.

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Morgue Drawer Four

Shortlisted for Germany's Friedrich Glauser Prize for best crime novel.

Coroner is the perfect job for Dr. Martin Gänsewein, who spends his days in peace and quiet autopsying dead bodies for the city of Cologne. Shy, but scrupulous, Martin appreciates his taciturn clients—until the day one of them starts talking to him. It seems the ghost of a recently deceased (and surprisingly chatty) small-time car thief named Pascha is lingering near his lifeless body in drawer number four of Martin's morgue. He remains for one reason: his “accidental” death was, in fact, murder.

Pascha is furious his case will go unsolved—to say nothing of his body's dissection upon Martin's autopsy table. But since Martin is the only person Pascha can communicate with, the ghost settles in with the good pathologist, determined to bring the truth of his death to light. Now Martin's staid life is rudely upended as he finds himself navigating Cologne's red-light district and the dark world of German car smuggling. Unless Pascha can come up with a plan—and fast—Martin will soon be joining him in the spirit world. Witty and unexpected, Morgue Drawer Four introduces a memorable (and reluctant) detective unlike any other in fiction today.

Note: Also, a great audiobook as well.

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The Tree and the Vine

“This courageous early work of lesbian fiction (1951) tells the gripping story of two women torn between desires and taboos in the years leading up to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. 

When Bea meets Erica at the home of a mutual friend, this chance encounter sets the stage for the story of two women torn between desire and taboo.

Erica, a reckless young journalist, pursues passionate but abusive affairs with different women. Bea, a reserved secretary, grows increasingly obsessed with Erica, yet denial and shame keep her from recognizing her attraction. Only Bea’s discovery that Erica is half-Jewish and a member of the Dutch resistance—and thus in danger—brings her closer to accepting her own feelings.

First published in 1954 in the Netherlands, Dola de Jong’s The Tree and the Vine was a groundbreaking work in its time for its frank and sensitive depiction of the love between two women, now available in a new translation.”

“A jewel hidden in plain sight.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“This compelling novel allows us entry into a world in which the word lesbian is unspeakable and to be a Jew is unspeakably dangerous.” —Evelyn Torton Beck, editor of Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology

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The Skin is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body

“What if your first true love broke all known taboos? What if your very first romance drowned you in a whirlpool of transgression? A coming-of-age novel that is minutely in tune with the perversions of its narrator’s body, The Skin Is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body defines category. The desperate account of a teenage boy in love with a much older riding instructor, it follows the unforgettable Bjorn as he pushes his flesh to its very limits, annihilating boundaries of gender and sexuality in a search for impossible gratification.

A feverish combination of stream of conscious, autobiography, collage, and narrative, Skin marks the arrival of a truly original literary voice. It is as omnivorous as the bodies within it, as unrestrained as the appetites, terrors, and trystings that celebrated author Bjorn Rasumssen evokes in poetic detail. Deeply emotional, erotic, elegiac, and pansexual, it caresses the wounds we visit upon our flesh and soul in an attempt to serve the urges of the body’s largest organ—the skin that covers and defines us.”

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The Adventures of China Iron

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2020 

Best books published in Latin America 2017 ―New York Times

Best books dealing with feminism, sisterhood and queerness ―Pagina/12

“‘I took off my dress and the petticoats and I put on the Englishman’s breeches and shirt. I put on his neckerchief and asked Liz to take the scissors and cut my hair short. My plait fell to the ground and there I was, a young lad. Good boy she said to me, then pulled my face towards her and kissed me on the mouth. It surprised me, I didn’t understand, I didn’t know you could do that and it was revealed to me so naturally: why wouldn’t you be able to do that? Liz’s imperious tongue entered my mouth, her spicy, flowery saliva tasted like curry and tea and lavender water.’

1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina’s richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building.

This subversive retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Cámara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.”

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Chronicle of the Murdered House

Winner of the 2017 Best Translated Book Award

Longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award

“The novel’s edgy and frank depictions of gender fluidity and sexual orientation begs comparisons to Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer while its themes of a great family in decay recalls the best work of William Faulkner.” —World Literature Today

“Long considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century Brazilian literature, Chronicle of the Murdered House finally became available in English in 2017.

Set in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, the novel relates the dissolution of a once proud patriarchal family that blames its ruin on the marriage of its youngest son, Valdo, to Nina—a vibrant, unpredictable, and incendiary young woman whose very existence seems to depend on the destruction of the household.

This family's downfall, peppered by stories of decadence, adultery, incest, and madness, is related through a variety of narrative devices, including letters, diaries, memoirs, statements, confessions, and accounts penned by the various characters.”

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La Bastarda

The first novel by an Equatorial Guinean woman to be translated into English.

Honor Book in the Global Literature in Libraries Best Translated YA Book & World Literature Today's Notable Translations of 2018

Orphaned Okomo lives under the watchful eye of her grandmother and dreams of finding her father. Forbidden from seeking him out, she enlists the help of other village outcasts: her gay uncle, and a gang of “mysterious” girls reveling in their so-called indecency. Drawn into their illicit trysts, Okomo finds herself falling for their leader and rebelling against the rigid norms of Fang culture. [Note: The Fang people also known as Fãn are a Central African ethnic group found in Equatorial Guinea, northern Gabon, & southern Cameroon.]

“A breakthrough novel that tells the world, from an Equatorial Guinean perspective, that there is so much necessary life outside of, beyond, before, and after patriarchy. For those of us who have been told that we do not exist. That we cannot exist. That we should not exist. This groundbreaking story full of love and nurturing is a spell for remembering that we do exist, we have existed, and that we must support each other to exist and thrive as who we are.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive: After the End of the World

“Though I live a world away from Equatorial Guinea, I saw so much of myself in Okomo: a tomboy itching to be free and to escape society’s rigged game. I cheered her on with every page, and wished—for myself and all girls—for the bravery to create our own world.” —Maggie Thrash, author of Honor Girl

“Obono's voice is assured and vital, and her tale of queer rebellion in Fang society is an exceptional take on the coming-of-age novel.” —Publishers Weekly

“A unique contribution to LGBTQ literature.” —Kirkus Reviews

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Born a Crime

“The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed. Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth.

Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist.

It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

The stories are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during a kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. ”

 “What makes Born a Crime such a soul-nourishing pleasure, even with all its darker edges and perilous turns, is reading Noah recount in brisk, warmly conversational prose how he learned to negotiate his way through the bullying and ostracism…What also helped was having a mother like Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah…Consider Born a Crime another such gift to her—and an enormous gift to the rest of us.” —USA Today

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Coconut

“An important rumination on youth in modern-day South Africa, this haunting debut novel tells the story of two extraordinary young women who have grown up black in white suburbs and must now struggle to find their identities.

The rich and pampered Ofilwe has taken her privileged lifestyle for granted, and must confront her swiftly dwindling sense of culture when her soulless world falls apart.

Meanwhile, the hip and sassy Fiks is an ambitious go-getter desperate to leave her vicious past behind for the glossy sophistication of city life, but finds Johannesburg to be more complicated and unforgiving than she expected.

These two stories artfully come together to illustrate the weight of history upon a new generation in South Africa.”

(A special thank you to book club member, Jennifer Koen for the group read suggestion.)

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Kaffir Boy

“Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years.

Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to cross the line between black and white and win a scholarship to an American university.”

“This is a rare look inside the festering adobe shanties of Alexandra, one of South Africa's notorious black townships. Rare because it comes from the heart of a passionate young African who grew up there.” — Chicago Tribune

”This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is itself a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered “Kaffir” from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do —he escaped to tell about it. Powerful, intense, inspiring.” — Publishers Weekly

Note - As detailed by Merriam Webster: In South Africa, the use of the term kaffir to refer to a black African is a profoundly offensive & inflammatory expression of contemptuous racism that is sufficient grounds for legal action. The term is associated especially with the era of apartheid, when it was commonly used as an offensive racial slur, & its offensiveness has only increased over time. It now ranks as perhaps the most offensive term in South African English.

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Long Walk to Freedom

“Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country.

After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world.

As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.

Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life—an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph.”

“The autobiography of global human rights icon Nelson Mandela is riveting…both a brilliant description of a diabolical system and a testament to the power of the spirit to transcend it.” —Washington Post

(A special thank you to book club member, Nicole Viola Hinz-Schouwstra for the group read suggestion.)

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Reclaiming the Soil

“The Rosie Motene story is about a young girl born to the Bafokeng nation during the apartheid era in South Africa.

At the time, Rosie’s mother worked for a white Jewish family in Johannesburg who offered to raise the child as one of their own. This generous gesture by the family created many opportunities for Rosie but also a trail of sacrifices for her parents.

As she grew, Rosie struggled to find her true identity.

She had access to the best of everything but as a black girl she floundered without her own culture or language.

This book describes Rosie’s journey through her fog of alienation to the belated dawning of her self-discovery as an African.”

“An extraordinary story of cultural confusion and the long way home to a black girl’s emotional roots.” —David Robbins

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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The Whale Caller

“The Whale Caller, Zakes Mda's fifth novel, is his most enchanting and accessible book yet, a romantic comedy of sorts in which the changing face of post-apartheid South Africa is revealed through prodigious, lyrical storytelling.

As the novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus, on the country's west coast, is overrun with whale watchers, foreign tourists wearing floral shirts and toting expensive binoculars, determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the Whale Caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he calls Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha fails to appear for weeks on end, the Whale Caller frets like a jealous lover-oblivious to the fact that the town drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red stiletto heels, is infatuated with him.

After much ado—which Mda relates with great relish, the two misfits fall in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and their on-again, off-again relationship suggests something of the fitful nature of change in post-apartheid South Africa, where just living from one day to the next can be challenge enough.

Mda has spoken of the end of apartheid as a lifting of the South African novelist's burden to write on political subjects. With The Whale Caller, he has written a tender, charming novel—the work of a virtuoso among international writers.”

“A voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration.” —The NY Times

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Being and Nothingness

“‘Revisit one of the most important pillars in modern philosophy with this new English translation—the first in more than 60 years—of Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal treatise on existentialism. ‘This is a philosophy to be reckoned with, both for its own intrinsic power and as a profound symptom of our time.’ —The New York Times.

In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre published his masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, and laid the foundation of his legacy as one of the greatest twentieth century philosophers. A brilliant and radical account of the human condition, Being and Nothingness explores what gives our lives significance.

In a new, more accessible translation, this foundational text argues that we alone create our values and our existence is characterized by freedom and the inescapability of choice. Far from being an internal, passive container for our thoughts and experiences, human consciousness is constantly projecting itself to the outside world and imbuing it with meaning.

Now with a new foreword by Harvard professor of philosophy Richard Moran, this clear-eyed translation guarantees that the groundbreaking ideas that Sartre introduced in this resonant work will continue to inspire for generations to come.”

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Nausea

“Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation.

His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which ‘spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time—the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.’

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (though he declined to accept it), Jean-Paul Sartre—philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist—holds a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. 

La Nausée, his first and best novel, is a landmark in Existential fiction and a key work of the twentieth century.”

“It is the most enjoyable book Sartre has ever written.” —The New Yorker

”The best-written and most interesting of Sartre's novels.” —Atlantic Monthly

”With Nausea, Sartre has succeeded magnificently—and horribly—in extending the realm of the novel to the outermost reaches of naked self-examination”—New York Post

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Les Misérables

“Introducing one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean—the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread—Les Misérables ranks among the greatest novels of all time. In it, Victor Hugo takes readers deep into the Parisian underworld, immerses them in a battle between good and evil, and carries them to the barricades during the uprising of 1832 with a breathtaking realism that is unsurpassed in modern prose.

Within his dramatic story are themes that capture the intellect and the emotions: crime and punishment, the relentless persecution of Valjean by Inspector Javert, the desperation of the prostitute Fantine, the amorality of the rogue Thénardier, and the universal desire to escape the prisons of our own minds. 

Les Misérables gave Victor Hugo a canvas upon which he portrayed his criticism of the French political and judicial systems, but the portrait that resulted is larger than life, epic in scope—an extravagant spectacle that dazzles the senses even as it touches the heart.”

“Hugo's genius was for the creation of simple and recognizable myth. The huge success of Les Misérables as a didactic work on behalf of the poor and oppressed is due to his poetic and myth-enlarged view of human nature.” —V. S. Pritchett

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Panic in Paris

“It all begins innocently enough when the corpse of a London boxer is discovered at sunrise on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. But the man was reportedly seen in London only a couple of hours earlier...

A great English detective and France's leading investigative reporter team up to solve a baffling mystery that will ultimately take them to a network of vast caverns under Paris inhabited by prehistoric monsters, waiting to be released…

Jules Lermina's Panic in Paris (1910) combines the tradition of utopian fiction with both the scientific advances of the 19th century and the pseudoscientific trappings of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871).

It also features some intriguing anticipations of two key works by Arthur Conan Doyle, prefiguring both The Lost World (1912) and The Poison Belt (1913). This volume also includes Lermina's classic vampire novella, The Elixir of Life (1890).”

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Voyage to Venus

“Published the same year as Jules Verne's classic From the Earth to the Moon and Henri de Parville's An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, Achille Eyraud's Voyage to Venus (1865) was the first novel to describe an interplanetary rocket-powered spaceship.

Eyraud supports his design with an elaborate (but ultimately flawed) pseudo-scientific argument and describes its cosmic voyage in a logical manner. Once on Venus, his protagonists discover a utopian society in which the sexes are equal and solar-powered robots toil in the fields.

Voyage to Venus has often been mentioned in many histories of space travel and science fiction, although the difficulty of obtaining the original text until now meant that few have read it.

This ground-breaking work is at last available in English in its first annotated translation by award-winning author Brian Stableford.”

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Billie

“A #1 bestseller in France and translated into over twenty-five languages, Billie is one of the most beloved French novels to be published in recent years.

A brilliant evocation of contemporary Paris and a moving tale of friendship, Gavalda’s new novel tells the story of two young people, Billie and Franck, who, as the story opens, are trapped in a gorge in the Cévennes Mountains. Billie was a beaten-down girl from an impoverished family; Franck was secretly gay and weighed down by a judgmental father with high expectations. Theirs is a story of unconditional love and a deep, platonic friendship, which unfolds in a series of flashbacks as Billie begins to tell stories from their lives in order to calm them as darkness encroaches. In alternating episodes, the novel moves between recollections of the characters’ childhoods and their dire predicament.

Franck’s life has been impacted by a childhood spent with a perennially unemployed father who toyed with Christian extremism and a mother anesthetized by antidepressants. A bright kid, Franck’s future was menaced at every turn by the bigotry surrounding him. As for Billie, her abiding wish as an adult is to avoid ever having to come into contact with her family again. To escape from her abusive and alcohol-addled family, she was willing to do anything and everything. The wounds have not entirely healed.

At the heart of Gavalda’s moving story lies a generosity of spirit that will take readers’ breath away, and an unshakeable belief in the power of art to lift the most fragile among us to new vistas from which they can see futures full of hope, love, and dignity. Billie is a beautifully crafted novel for readers of all ages and from all walks of life that conveys a positive message about overcoming life’s trials and tribulations.”

“Billie is a revelation! It's Gavalda's finest novel yet.” —France 2

“The work is a testament to Gavalda's fine storytelling skills, which remain true even in the books' translation into English.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

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The Boy

“Winner of the prestigious Prix Femina, The Boy is an expansive and entrancing historical novel that follows a nearly feral child from the French countryside as he joins society and plunges into the torrid events of the first half of the 20th century.

The boy does not speak. The boy has no name. The boy, raised half-wild in the forests of southern France, sets out alone into the wilderness and the greater world beyond. Without experience of another person aside from his mother, the boy must learn what it is to be human, to exist among people, and to live beyond simple survival.

As this wild and naive child attempts to join civilization, he encounters earthquakes and car crashes, ogres and artists, and, eventually, all-encompassing love and an inescapable war. His adventures take him around the world and through history on a mesmerizing journey, rich with unforgettable characters. A hamlet of farmers fears he’s a werewolf, but eventually raise him as one of their own. A circus performer who toured the world as a sideshow introduces the boy to showmanship and sanitation. And a chance encounter with an older woman exposes him to music and the sensuous pleasures of life. The boy becomes a guide whose innocence exposes society’s wonder, brutality, absurdity, and magic.

Beginning in 1908 and spanning three decades, The Boy is as an emotionally and historically rich exploration of family, passion, and war from one of France’s most acclaimed and bestselling authors.”

“You’ll be stunned by this novel... Marcus Malte is clearly an astonishing author, oscillating between poetry, mystery, and epic, he has the ability to surprise and it’s a delight to read.” —Libération

“You’ll go from laughter to tears in this masterful account of the discovery of the world’s trials.” —La Vie

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