In category: Review

Translated from French by Willard Wood (Les Fugitives, 2020) Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is a work of non-fiction that delves into the life of Marie van Goethem, the young model for Degas’ famous sculpture Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (Little Dancer Aged Fourteen). In it, Camille Laurens takes us back to Paris in the Belle […]

It was a great honour last week to chair the virtual launch of Holiday Heart, interviewing author Margarita García Robayo and translator Charlotte Coombe for a wonderful event organised by Carolina Orloff and Jules Danskin of Charco Press. I’m writing up some of the main points into a little piece here, so that those of […]

Edited by Dai Congrong and Jin Li (Comma Press, 2020) Featuring Wang Anyi, Xiao Bai, Shen Dacheng, Chen Danyan, Cai Jun, Chen Qiufan, Xia Shang, Teng Xiolan, Fu Yuehui and Wang Zhanhei Translated by Lee Anderson, Yu Yan Chen, Jack Hargreaves, Paul Harris, Frances Nichol, Christopher Macdonald, Carson Ramsdell, Josh Stenberg, Katherine Tse, and Helen […]

Translated from Spanish (Colombia) by Charlotte Coombe (Charco Press, 2020) *Details of the virtual launch of Holiday Heart at the end of this post (or click here if you can’t wait) – it’s going to be fabulous – and free!* Meet Pablo and Lucía, two extremely unlikeable protagonists whose marriage is breaking down in the […]

Translated from Thai by Mui Poopoksakul (Tilted Axis Press, 2020) Arid Dreams is the latest offering from Tilted Axis Press, and part of a very strong 2020 catalogue for the publishing house: this collection of short stories offers a wide-reaching study of class and gender in Thailand and represents a key contribution to the intersectional feminism […]

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how the lockdown would change the way I provide content on the Translating Women blog. In that open letter, I made a vague mention of hoping to include some videos in my reviews; in the back of my mind at the time was a half-formed thought of […]

Earlier this year, Les Fugitives published the final book in a trilogy of studies by Nathalie Léger. The first, Suite for Barbara Loden, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon, marked the launch of Les Fugitives in 2015 and became the cornerstone of their publishing identity. Exposition, translated by Amanda DeMarco, was published in December […]

Translated from French by Adriana Hunter (Harvill Secker, 2020) All About Sarah is Pauline Delabroy-Allard’s powerful debut novel about love: love as an all-consuming force, love as a lit match that can burn itself out, love as a sickness. To “just” call it a love story, though, would be to downplay its intensity: it is […]

Translated from French by Tina Kover (Snuggly Books, 2018) This is the final instalment in a trilogy of reviews of translations by women I met at the Translating Women conference last year (see my reviews of Bellevue and Not My Time To Die for the first two), and it’s also the first of my shorter-format lockdown […]

Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2019) A Girl Returned is an intense and affecting account of how a life can change forever in a single day. The unnamed teenage narrator leads a happy and harmonious existence with her affluent parents in a nice neighbourhood of an Italian city. Or, rather, this was her life: […]