In category: Review

Earlier this year, literary translators Charlie Coombe and Tina Kover set up Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel dedicated to putting translators in the spotlight. The channel grew from a speculative tweet by Tina, who at the time was considering reading a section from one of her translations and wondered whether there would be an audience […]

Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Seven Stories Press, 2020) This week the new UK imprint of Seven Stories Press releases Nadia Terranova’s English-language debut, a coming-of-age story with a family tragedy at its heart. Ida Laquidara is a 30-something writer living in Rome with her husband, the dependable (if not exactly passionate) Pietro. This […]

Translated from German by Sinéad Crowe (V&Q Books, 2020) The new English-language imprint of V&Q Books offers another belter for its launch: following on from last week’s review of Paula (Sandra Hoffmann, translated by Katy Derbyshire), today I’m looking at Lucy Fricke’s Daughters, a book that manages to switch effortlessly between grief and humour and […]

Translated from German by Katy Derbyshire (V&Q Books, 2020) This week sees the launch of German publisher V&Q’s English-language imprint: spearheaded by Katy Derbyshire, the new imprint brings some of the most exciting new fiction in German into English. Two of the three launch releases are by women writers, and so this is the first […]

Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2020) I’m going to start this review with a confession: until last month, I had never read anything by Elena Ferrante. Okay, I’ve got that off my chest. The Lying Life of Adults is a stand-alone book that has yet to receive the attention and hype of […]

Translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 2020) After the success of Selva Almada’s English-language debut The Wind That Lays Waste (translated by Chris Andrews, published by Charco Press in 2019, and reviewed here), this autumn Charco brings us her next translated work, the journalistic fiction Dead Girls. The pairing of Almada with […]

Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador Books, 2020) Breasts and Eggs is a spectacular and delicate exposition of what it is to be in a woman’s body when that body is eternally viewed as either a commodity, a conduit for male pleasure, or a reproductive vessel. The breasts and eggs of […]

Translated from Spanish (Mexico) by Suzanne Jill Levine (Seven Stories Press, 2020) This collection of short stories from acclaimed Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel is the second release from the new UK imprint of Seven Stories Press. In it, Nettel blends the familiar with the strange in a body of stories that offer a kaleidoscope of […]

Translated from Czech by Alex Zucker (Jantar Publishing, 2017) Three Plastic Rooms is narrated by an ageing prostitute, and is an extended internal monologue that offers insight into her musings on the world, her life, and her profession. The opening line erupts with contempt (“I wonder if anyone ever gives her a grinding down to […]

Translated from Catalan by Kathleen McNerney and Helena Buffery (Francis Boutle Publishers, 2020) This is a very different kind of novel from those I normally read for Translating Women, and will be a treat for anyone who enjoys creative biographies. The Passion According to Renée Vivien represents a literary project to uncover the hidden life […]