Women in Brazil have long faced verbal and physical abuse by males, both strangers and the men in their lives. Artists in film, TV, music, and literature have also called attention – on social media and the press – to this urgent crisis. The publication this month of Amanda Sarasien’s translation of “Springtime in the Bones” by Állex Leilla is uncannily timely. This disquieting novel, published in Brazil in 2011, adds a powerful voice to the millions of Brazilians who are saying no to misogyny and crimes against women.
Born to an Azerbaijani family in Russia in the early 1990s, Egana Djabbarova grew up in a conservative diaspora that scrutinized every bit of her body. In her memoir, “My Dreadful Body,” translated by Lisa C. Hayden, she explores different parts of herself with the ruthlessness of a physician and the care of a poet.
Mieko Kawakami’s latest novel, “Sisters in Yellow,” is loosely framed by the COVID-19 pandemic, though the main story unfolds in the 1990s, after the economic “bubble” bursts and recession sets in, emphasizing the intersection between gender and precarity. Kawakami’s novel is as personal as it is political and, I would suggest, could be read as a call for a feminist ethics of care: an approach to care as interdependent, relational, contextual and intersectional.
The history of French colonialism in Algeria can be traced back to 1830 when the country was invaded by the Kingdom of France. After 132 years of colonial presence in the region, the country gained independence in July 1962. Set in Algiers following this declaration, Bey’s characters grapple with a changing country, one bent on pushing out and eradicating the impacts of over a century spent under French rule and embracing Arab unity in the formation of a codified nation state. I
Unbudgeable Feelings: Toon Tellegen’s “The Cricket’s Healing,” Translated from Dutch by David Colmer
Toon Tellegen’s “The Cricket’s Healing,” translated by David Colmer, explores themes of loneliness and depression through animal fables. Behind his surreal metaphors and silly yet strange encounters between animals, we can find very real social commentary and a deep analysis of the landscape of the human mind.
Using Lima as its backdrop, the novel presents two mostly disjointed pieces of writing. One, a largely autobiographical narrative of a certain Marito’s job as a radio news writer and his clandestine relationship with and later marriage to his aunt (by law, not blood), and the other, a collection of over-the-top radio soap operas written by the Bolivian escribidor Pedro Camacho.
Rosa takes up the challenge of reinventing (recentering) her writing around women—an act of creation which Cixous might refer to as écriture féminine. And while culinary themes dominate her narrative, with lists of foods and recipes often spanning several pages at a time, Rosa accomplishes this recentering using two other themes: the metaphor of the sea, and a reimagined matrilineal genealogy.
Verbal Mycology: Olya Stoyanova’s “Happiness Street,” Translated from Bulgarian by Katerina Stoykova
In Bulgarian poet Olya Stoyanova’s award winning 2013 poetry collection “Happiness Street,” translated by Katerina Stoykova and published in 2025, empathy is not merely a byproduct of the reading experience; rather, it is something that permeates and motivates each of her poems.
Throughout “Poemi Conviviali,” music surfaces again and again, sometimes eerie and disquieting, often located in the limbo between life and death, or dream and reality; sometimes as the Dionysian, ecstatic sound of drums and double flutes, but most often as melodies performed on a stringed instrument, the lyre, which is the ancestor of the modern harp.
The work of French poet Gabrielle Althen (pseudonym of Colette Astier) is a simmering broth of intensity, strangeness and wild overgrowth verging on surrealism. These qualities are paradoxically nurtured rather than inhibited by her preference for miniscule, aphoristic snippets of text ‘sculpted’ (her phrase) out of the blank space that envelops them.
James Shea has risen to this age-long challenge in his beautifully crafted translation of “Applause for a Cloud,” Kamakura Sayumi’s latest collection (Black Ocean, 2025). A poet in his own right, Shea brings a crystalline language to the dense and endlessly changeable process of translation, offering English-language readers a ride along Kamakura’s intercontinental itinerary, including stops in Morocco and Italy.
Poignant, and at times breathtakingly honest, “In Farthest Seas” joins a select group of narratives that help us cope with the death of a loved one through the eyes of the writer, who cannot help but transform that pain into a story so that the writer, as well as the reader, may begin to comprehend it.
Miriam Karpilove (1888-1956) wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when Yiddish women authors were gaining entrance to the world of Yiddish prose, a form from which they had been largely absent. Karpilove’s epistolary novel “Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe” (1911) was composed during a vibrant moment of this minority language’s literary history, when Yiddish literature was carving a new path as a modern world literature after the death of the “classic” Yiddish writers.
This dialogue originated from my reading in August 2024 of Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery, translated by John Taylor. Every day I put Franca’s collection of essays and narratives in my backpack and set off on long hikes in the high mountains.
Rather than retelling myths, in “The Leucothea Dialogues” Cesare Pavese uses them as a framework for meditations on fate, death, suffering, and the fraught relationship between gods and humans.