Happy Women in Translation Month!!

My favorite time of my reading year.

August is my favorite reading month simply because it is Women in Translation month. I look forward to it every year. It’s so exciting going through my shelves to pull books to read from and I love seeing what other readers have decided to pick up during the month.

WITMonth - aka Women in Translation Month - is an annual celebration of women writers from around the world, writing in languages other than English. Started by Meytal Radzinski in 2014. Follow #WITMonth on Twitter, Instagram, Booktube, and across the world! (from https://www.womenintranslation.org/witmonth)

Throwback to my 2021 reel for Women in Translation Month.

I cohost a weekly conversational bookish podcast called TBR Lowdown with my good friend NerdyNurseReads. In addition to our podcast, we run a very lowkey book club where we read books by women in translation and an annual reading challenge called #12Women12Countries. You can see more information about those things on our website at https://wwww.tbrlowdown.com.

Now, for the books I’ve decided to start Women in Translation Month with…

This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes.

Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories—spiraling from real events—that bleed together reportage and the author’s rich and rigorous imagination.

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer by Belén López Peiró, translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy

A fractured account of family abuse, secrets, and the cost of pursuing the truth. In Belén López Peiró’s Why Did You Come Back Every Summer , family means home and safety, but also pain and betrayal. Her uncle, a police commissioner, sexually abuses her. His wife and daughter shelter, then reject her. Her mother is his sister. And no one wants to believe her. This is a true story of intimate sexual violence. Told in multiple voices, and through real police reports and interviews, it explores the demands and the cost of ensuring the truth is heard. Most important is the shifting, slipping loyalties among loved ones. What do you owe to your family? What do they owe you? How far will you go to get yourself back? But now it’s time to give yourself some closure and start to tell yourself another story. The story of your life, which doesn’t end here. This is just the beginning.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside

First published to acclaim in Germany, The Wall chronicles the life of the last surviving human on earth, an ordinary middle-aged woman who awakens one morning to find that everyone else has vanished. Assuming her isolation to be the result of a military experiment gone awry, she begins the terrifying work of survival and self-renewal. This novel is at once a simple and moving tale and a disturbing meditation on humanity.

I’m excited to read this and then watch the movie!

Abigail by Magda Szabo, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

Abigail, the story of a headstrong teenager growing up during World War II, is the most beloved of Magda Szabó’s books in her native Hungary. Gina is the only child of a general, a widower who has long been happy to spoil his bright and willful daughter. Gina is devastated when the general tells her that he must go away on a mission and that he will be sending her to boarding school in the country. She is even more aghast at the grim religious institution to which she soon finds herself consigned. She fights with her fellow students, she rebels against her teachers, finds herself completely ostracized, and runs away. Caught and brought back, there is nothing for Gina to do except entrust her fate to the legendary Abigail, as the classical statue of a woman with an urn that stands on the school’s grounds has come to be called. If you’re in trouble, it’s said, leave a message with Abigail and help will be on the way. And for Gina, who is in much deeper trouble than she could possibly suspect, a life-changing adventure is only beginning.

Mina’s Matchbox by Yogo Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
I started this in July, so I’ll finish this one soon.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

Incidental Inventions by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein

“This is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me.”

With these words, Elena Ferrante, the bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian. For a full year she penned short pieces, the subjects of which were suggested by editors at the Guardian, turning the writing process into a kind of prolonged interlocution; the subjects ranged from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the adaptation of her novels to film and TV. As she said in her final column: “I have written as an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that—if I have the will and the time—I’d like to develop within real narrative mechanisms.”

So, those are the books I’m starting Women in Translation Month with. I am so excited to get into these reads!!

Are you participating in Women in Translation Month? What books are you planning to read?

I guess this post also serves as my first action in reigniting this Substack. You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and Lemon8. I’m BookLadyReads everywhere.