100 Best Novels, in Translation, Since 1900, Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution, Donald Trump and the Triumph of White Identity Politics, The Moroccan Monarchy’s War on Journalism, Donald Trump’s Final Act: Snuffing Out the Promise of Democracy in the Middle East, On Capitalism, Racism, Trump, and Pandemo-Fascism, The Real Resistance Begins Now: 25 Groups That Will Keep Fighting No Matter Who’s President, Seagulls Without a Sea: Days at Internally Displaced Persons Camps in Iraq, The Long, Long Road Home: the Afghan Refugee Crisis Enters Its Fifth Decade, Air Force Veterans of Plutonium Dust Disaster Win Class Action Standing, Americans are Broke and Hungry, as Politicians Have Sat on Their Hands, The Great Awokening and the Stillborn Revolution. Cervantes’ classic is one of the only books that can truly be considered required reading around the world, so you can’t lose with the great Grossman’s translation of the classic Spanish tale of Don Quixote’s original quixotic quest. From Philip Roth to Gary Shteyngart, Gogol’s genius and dark sense of humor resonates to this very day, and that’s why Dead Souls remains one of the pillars of not just Russian but global literature. The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet [French] 1953, 27. His new book Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray) will be published in June by CounterPunch Books. Author and activist Margaret Atwood wins this year’s Best Fiction award for her long-anticipated sequel to the dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale.The book picks up the story 15 years after handmaid Offred’s ambiguous fate in the theocratic nation of Gilead and continues the saga’s dark contemporary resonance. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, translators). Humanitarian Aid in the Time of the Virus, Towards the End of the Biopolitical Plague, More Brave New Food: FDA Approves An “Innovative Animal Biotechnology Product”, Ways of Escape: a Short Guide for Americans Seeking Political Asylum, Universal Soldiers of Resistance to Fascist Thinking: Chomsky on Extinction, Abuse on the Mainland: Australia’s Medevac Hotel Detentions, Agenda 2021: Resist the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination, Mitch Wants Corporations to be Able Kill You With Impunity, Red State Secession from the US of A is a Great Idea, Crime Fiction and the Commodification of Life, India Can Already Afford a Welfare State, It Just Needs to Tax Its Wealthiest Citizens, As Georgia Goes, So Goes the Senate…and the Country, Trump’s Lies About Immigrants Should End With His Presidency, Confronting and Ending the US Blockade Against Cuba, Insurgency Matters: Progressive DAs May Change Policing. Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz [Hungarian] 1975, 32. Eighteen-year-old Reuyen is the reincarnation of Queen Swan. Major works in other languages are being translated into English all the time, meaning that there’s no time like the present for you to enjoy books from places like Russia, Egypt, Mexico, and other nations around the globe. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende (Magda Bogin, translator). During our 20 year friendship, we talked about novels, films and poems nearly as much as we did politics and certainly found greater enjoyment in long-ranging debates about the relative merits of Waugh, Stendahl and Proust. Here though the rankings are tilted more toward my own biases, since Alex and I had only gotten round to slotting the first 25 or so books before he died. There are two kinds of Gabriel García Márquez fans: Love in the Time of Cholera types and those who will swear up and down that this landmark example of Latin American magical realism is the greatest work by the Colombian Nobel Prize winner. Unlike our previous lists, this time we chose to rank the books. Hotel Splendid by Marie Redonnet [French] 1988, 77. Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes [Spanish] 1975, 60. Selected Stories, Robert Walser (Christopher Middleton, translator), Equally funny and strange, these collected stories are a good place to start reading the German author Susan Sontag called “a good-humored, sweet Beckett.”, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir (Leonard M. Friedman, translator). All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg [Italian] 1952, 25. The Real Story of Ah-Q (1921-2; tr Julia Lovell) is a short fiction classic in China and was a catalyst for the New Culture Movement. It’s unacceptable if your only experience with the musketeers (and don’t forget d’Artagnan) involved either seeing the mostly awful film adaptations of this Romantic-era novel or eating the candy bars named after this Dumas classic, which is as exciting today as it was when it was originally serialized in the mid-19th century. Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation (By Ken Liu 2016) A Private Life by Chen Ran (陈染, 1962) (First published 1996, 2004 transl. The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Expurey [French] 1943, 10. A Dark Night’s Passing by Naoya Shiga (Japanese) 1937, 78. Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translators). Before Alex died, we’d been working on putting together two lists of our favorite novels written since 1900, similar to the very popular lists we’d done years before for nonfiction books in English and in translation. Homo Faber by Max Frisch (German) 1957, (With many thanks for their valuable input, even when it was ignored: Ben Sonnenberg, Kimberly Willson-St. Clair, Daisy Cockburn, Joshua Frank, Ron Jacobs, Carl Estabrook, Christine Karatnytsky and JoAnn Wypijewski.). I’m astonished. While we could call the Argentinian author one of the 20th century’s great literary masters, we run into the problem that the place in literature that Borges occupies is totally his own, with no true contemporaries or successors. One of the great ongoing literary events is the translation of this Norwegian author’s six autobiographical books that, yes, share a name with a certain murderous dictator’s autobiography. and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch. We're thrilled that author and translator Michael Kandel will be a featured speaker at Readercon this week! Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (Russian) 1996. The Time of the Doves by Merce Rodoreda [Spanish] 1962, 93. The publication of this Austrian-Jewish author’s works by New York Review of Books Classics have helped bring Zweig back into the limelight he knew during his lifetime. Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! Top 10 Great Dutch Crime Fiction Novels Share Here is a list of great Dutch crime fiction novels you want to check out: Dutch Crime Novelists are not that well-known compared to their British and Scandinavian counterparts, but believe it or not, there is some great authors coming from this region. To propose a book, please tell us about the author, the work, and why readers will love the book, using the form below. My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk (Erdağ Göknar, translator). The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (German) 1910, 85. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon [Spanish] 2001, 83. My Struggle, Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd (Don Bartlett, translator). Sebald (German) 1995, 87. The Jokers, Albert Cossery (Anna Moschovakis, translator). The President by Miguel Angel Asturias [Spanish] 1946, 24. His most recent books are Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution and The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink (with Joshua Frank) He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter  @JSCCounterPunch . Collage with an airplane, air mail, vintage letters and stamps We know books improve our capacity for empathy. Because people tend to feel more passionately about novels than treatises on the surplus-value theory and we hoped that our list would give CounterPunchers something new to fight over. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide [French] 1925, 43. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust (Lydia Davis, translator). Since watching the latest film adaptation with Anne Hathaway and Wolverine will take you about as long as it would to just read Hugo’s massive historical saga, which culminates with 1832’s June Rebellion in Paris, why not do yourself the favor of reading one of the most important works of the entire 19th century instead of getting “Master of the House” stuck in your head again? Great River Review was founded by Emilio DeGrazia of Winona, Minnesota, in 1975. In a review of the book for El País , Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas said of Navarro: “This author’s literary talent is a natural gift (…) the subtle, almost hidden, true avant-gardist of her generation.” In sinology, the Classic Chinese Novels are two sets of the four or six best-known traditional Chinese novels.The Four Classic Novels include Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber, and the Six Classic Novels add Rulin waishi and Jin Ping Mei to this list. Don’t tell me you haven’t read your Bulgakov? July 09, 2014 in Books, Events, Fiction, Latin American Literature, Science Fiction, Translation. 90. It’s really a shame we don’t talk much about this 1926 Nobel Prize-winning Italian author, especially since her 1902 novel really has it all: love, false imprisonment, heartbreak, and a divorced couple’s forbidden affair. Fiction New Fiction Book Awards Fiction in Translation The Booker Prizes Translation Bettany Hughes She is the author of numerous books, including Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore; The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for The Good Life – a New York Times bestseller – and Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities – a Sunday Times bestseller. Duras drew on experiences from her own life to create this PEN Translation Prize winner about the affair between a teenage girl living in French colonial Vietnam and an older, wealthier Chinese man. Republic of Congo-born author Mabanckou’s uproarious 2005 comic novel will surely whet your appetite for contemporary African literature, but it should also be acknowledged as one of the finest novels by one of the best French-language authors writing today. Dolly City, Orly Castel-Bloom (Dalya Bilu, translator). A Heart So White by Javier Marias [Spanish] 1992, 67. Amazon Crossing is always searching for great international reads for a global English-speaking audience. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa [Spanish] 2000, 29. Calvino was one of those writers who existed on a whole other level. The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet [French] 1949, 39. If you’re looking to get your literary passport stamped, here are 50 destinations to start you off — but, by all means, don’t let these be the only translated books you read. The literary world has been in the grips of Lispectormania for quite some time now, with critics comparing this Russian-born Brazilian writer with everybody from Kafka to Woolf. Despair by Vladimir Nabokov [Russian] 1934, 30. Candide, Voltaire (Burton Raffel, translator). Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges (various translators). Hurry, before all the beaches disappear…, 1. Not reading it means that you’re forever banned from calling things “Kafkaesque.”, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, translator). Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov (David Magarshack, translator). Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo [Italian] 1923, 20. The Conspiracy by Paul Nizan [French] 1938, 80. Fiction—and to a lesser extent, nonfiction—helps us empathize with and understand other people and cultures. How Many Americans Have You Killed Since May? Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald. Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb [Hungarian] 1937, 48. Against Nature, Joris-Karl Huysmans (John Howard, translator). Red Lights by Georges Simenon [French] 1953, 61. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis [Greek] 1946, 63. I finished the novel and immediately plunged back in for a second helping. The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch [German] 1945, 16. @ab_reads Fiction in Translation Picks. So it’s no surprise then that Bulgakov heads our list of the best novels in translation written since 1900 or that an equally surreal, though less comic, novel of oppressive bureaucracy, Kafka’s The Trial, follows it. Jacob the Liar by Jurek Becker (German) 1969, 86. “Jeffrey, don’t you think Frankie could play Behemoth in the movie?”. The Nobel Prize winner’s classic tale of an Algerian man who could seem to care less about anything — including the death of his mother, the Arab man he murders, and the fate that awaits him for his crime — is a perfect existential allegory. Palestine +100 (English, Paperback) Mazen Maarouf, Selma Dabbagh $15.64 . Thus no: Gunter Grass or Michel Houellebecq. 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