Tove Ditlevsen: Childhood
By the time she was ten years old Tove Ditlevsen knew she wanted to be a poet. The biggest obstacle to that dream was the times in which she lived.…
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki: The Key
The unnamed husband in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Key (1956, tr. Howard Hibbett, 1960) has long maintained a diary, though as he opens his first entry for the new year, he sets out…
Peter Adolphsen: The Brummstein
Danish writer Peter Adolphsen‘s first work in English was his 2006 novel, Machine, which followed a drop of oil over the massive expanse of fifty-five million years, and somehow wrapped…
David Albahari: Götz and Meyer
“Having never seen them, I can only imagine them” is how David Albahari’s narrator opens on the subject of Götz and Meyer, two non-commissioned officers, in this 1998 (tr. Ellen…
Will Maclean: The Apparition Phase
Ghosts, creaky old mansions, seances, and the 1970s, are the surface level features of The Apparition Phase (2020), the debut novel from Will Maclean, a ghost story that straddles the…
Peter Adolphsen: Machine
The passage of fifty-five millions years sounds extremely epic, but here, in Peter Adolphsen’s Machine (2006, tr. Charlotte Barslund, 2007) that passage in time is compressed into the less monumental…
Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones
Despite existing in some literary middle ground between short story collection and novel, Jim Crace’s debut, Continent (1986), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His encore, The Gift of Stones…
Kerstin Ekman: The Dog
“Where does something begin?” is the opening line to Kerstin Ekman‘s The Dog (1986, tr. Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright, 2009), and it seems at first a silly question. Where…
Yuri Herrera: Kingdom Cons
While Yuri Herrera already has two novels rendered in English, his third to be translated, Kingdom Cons (2008, tr. Lisa Dillman, 2017) was actually his debut. A slim volume, like…
Dexter Palmer: Version Control
Technology in the early twenty-first century is changing our lives — the way we do tasks; how we interact with friends; how we meet potential partners. The rise of Big…