Lily Meyer

It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate. But they cannot be completely divided. Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos and Oksana Lutsyshyna's Ivan and Phoebe help readers connect with time past.

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, The House on Via Gemito, and Cousins together form a tour of human darkness where liberation comes in many forms.

AI may be the topic du jour, but for now only a human can read attentively and sensitively enough to genuinely recreate literature in a new language, as translators have done with these three works.

Chinese novelist Yan Lianke treats the deities of China's major religions as quiet, omnipresent participants in the novel's events, which range from slapstick comedy to shocking violence.

On a Woman's Madness and Forbidden Notebook have been highly lauded in their original languages for decades but, like the more recent Black Foam, inaccessible to English readers — until now.

Concerning My Daughter, Hugs and Cuddles and Freeway: La Movie do not pretend to be easy reads, yet they are all completely consuming.

Iraqi poet Faleeha Hassan's memoir War and Me, Mexican novelist Brenda Lozano's Witches, and Uyghur novelist and social critic Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets have a few broad commonalities.

Mutt-Lon's The Blunder, Pina by Titaua Peu, and Thuận's Chinatown all come from different continents and deal, glancingly or in depth, with French colonialism.

New translations of Juan Emar's Yesterday, Cristina Rivera Garza's New and Selected Stories, and Gabriela Alemán's Family Album offer a look at human nature — and adventures along the way.

Jhumpa Lahiri mixes detailed explorations of craft with broader reflections on her own artistic life, as well as the "essential aesthetic and political mission" of translation.