I picked up Natural Enemies of Books from the excellent independent book and magazine shop Rare Mags. I’m interested in the history of printing and typography and wanted to know more about women’s roles in a male-dominated industry. Natural Enemies of Books is a response to the 1937 publication Bookmaking on the Distaff Side, which […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
This is the first book I’ve read by Hanne Ørstavik. Stay With Me is her sixteenth novel. She has won multiple awards in her native Norway and her novel Love, translated into English by Martin Aitken, was a finalist in the 2018 National Book Awards for Translated Literature in the US. Aitken is the translator […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
In When Women Kill, translated by Sophie Hughes, Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán examines four true crime cases, each one a murder committed by a woman, to reveal the backgrounds of those women and the reasons they chose violence. Zerán trained as a lawyer, and this book draws on that training to dissect why some […]| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Nina Bouraoui’s novel Satisfaction is told in the form of journal entries. The journals, seven of them, belong to Mme Akli and cover the period 1977-1978. Mme Akli is a French woman married t…| What I Think About When I Think About Reading
Whenever I’m searching the stacks for a book to read for #WITMonth, I always try to see if I’ve anything translated in my Virago collection so I can read something which fits for more than one event. However, that’s not always so easy, as I think the bulk of my Viragos are English language ones, […]| Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings
I lost count a little bit while packing books, moving, finding books on my Kindle, but I think I’m nearing the end of my 20 Books of Summer (having read a few not on the original list as well). These three latest ones were all on my list, and had been buried on my Kindle … Continue reading #20Books of Summer and #WITMonth: #16-18| findingtimetowrite
🔢 In 1975, a brilliant Professor of Mathematics had a car accident, which caused a severe head injury, with a peculiar side effect. His memory of events before the accident is intact, but after 1975, the Professor lives with short-term memory of only eighty minutes. It means that after eighty minutes, his memory would be completely erased, except for that of 1975 and before. "In the simplest terms, it's as if he has a single, eighty-minute videotape inside his head, and when he records any...| Fanda Classiclit
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. Translated by Irene Ash (1955). Penguin Books, 1998 (1954). “How infinitely desirable those two years suddenly appeared to me, those happy years I was so willing to renounce the other day . . . the liberty to think, even to choose wrongly or not at all, the freedom to choose … Continue reading The freedom to choose wrongly: #WITMonth| Calmgrove Books
The critically acclaimed novelist, essayist and screenwriter Eileen Chang was one of the greatest chroniclers of Chinese life in the 20th century. In Love in a Fallen City, an insightful, exquisite…| JacquiWine's Journal
The Mark, the award-winning debut novel of Icelandic writer Frida Isberg, now translated into English by Larissa Kyzer, offers the reader a glimpse of one possible future, though whether its proposal is utopian or dystopian will differ from reader to reader just as it does from character to character. In it, psychologists have developed an […]| 1streading's Blog
Remarkably, Solvej Balle’s planned heptalogy On the Calculation of Volume is not the only seven volume series begun by a Danish author in 2020 and published in English this year. Asta Olivia Nordenhof has also seen the first novel in her Scandinavian Star series (named after a passenger ferry which caught fire in 1990 killing […]| 1streading's Blog
Many of the eight stories in Guadalupe Nettel’s collection The Accidentals (now translated by Rosalind Harvey) revolve around family life. In the opening story, ‘Imprinting’, the narrator discovers…| 1streading's Blog
In this fascinating, deeply moving book, the Italian writer Marta Barone takes the reader on a journey to reconstruct the father, Leonardo Barone (LB), she only partially knew before his death – an investigation that takes us back to The Years of Lead, a time of radical protest and political turmoil in Italy during the […]| JacquiWine's Journal
What a phenomenal book this is, an autobiographical feminist novel first published in Italian in 1906, under a pseudonym due to its radical content. Touching on similar themes to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal text The Yellow Wallpaper and Alba de Cespedes’ startling confessional novel Forbidden Notebook, in which a woman explores the right to her […]| JacquiWine's Journal
Long Live the Post Horn! is my second encounter with the acclaimed Norwegian writer Vigdis Horth’s work, and happily, it’s a much more satisfying experience than my first. Her 2020 novel, Is Mother Dead was too intense and claustrophobic for me, but Post Horn is right up my street. Ostensibly, a portrayal of a lonely […]| JacquiWine's Journal
🏺 My first interest of this book was pottery. I always admire people who are passionate about something - either hobby or career; and you rarely read about pottery. Add "healing" with that, and an image of a cat sitting near the potteries - well, it sold me instantly! And I think it would be a good choice for this year's #WITMonth. A feel-good story with a tinge of slow-burning romance, set in an Asian country.| Fanda Classiclit
Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson. Pappan och Havet (‘The Father and the Sea’, 1965) translated by Kingsley Hart (1966). Muminsaga No 8. Puffin Books, 2019. It’s August in the corner of the world where the Moomin family lives, and Moominpappa is restless – it’s hot, he’s worried about forest fires, and anxious about any … Continue reading Untethered: #ToveTrove #Moomin80| Calmgrove Books
Abahn Sabana David is a 1970 novel by Marguerite Duras (though the translation, by Kazim Ali, is from 2016), its title originating from the three (or four) characters who spend the night together waiting for the arrival of Gringo who (in his absence) is portrayed as a powerful man not averse to using violence in […]| 1streading's Blog
Hello! I am dipping my toe back in the water – just to see how it feels. My last post on Heavenali was in mid June, and at the beginning of July I stopped reading other blog posts and a…| heavenali
Summer’s the perfect time to focus on women’s writing in translation, with #WiTMonth running all August on social media – and hopefully on your bookshelves.| V&Q Books