Foreign Language Books
Literature in Translation

Listed by original language. See also the world literature category.

Afrikaans

*The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (Wilma Stockenström)
- a slave woman survives a doomed expedition into the interior

Albanian

Arabic

Basque

Bengali

My Kind of Girl (Buddhadeva Bose)
- "Is the memory of happiness that has passed, happy or sad?"

Bulgarian

Natural Novel (Georgi Gospodinov)
- a comedy in fragments

Catalan

Salt Water (Josep Pla)
- stories of the north Catalan coast
*When I Sing, Mountains Dance (Irene Sola)
- renewal and compassion after violence in the Catalan Pyrenees

Chinese

Czech

Mendelssohn is on the Roof (Jiri Weil)
- a blackly comic tragedy about the Holocaust in Prague
*Notebooks from New Guinea (Vojtech Novotny)
Fieldnotes of a Tropical Biologist
War With the Newts (Karel Capek)
- sweeping science fiction satire

Danish

*A Change of Time (Ida Jessen)
- facing widowhood in a Danish country town
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Peter Høeg)
- an atmospheric thriller set in Copenhagen and Greenland

Dutch

Egyptian

*Love Songs of the New Kingdom (John L. Foster)
- ancient Egyptian love poems

Estonian

French

Galician

In the Wilderness (Manuel Rivas)
- magic and the mundane in a Galician village
*Vermeer's Milkmaid (Manuel Rivas)
- superb Galician short stories

German

Gikuyu

Matigari (Ngugi wa Thiong'o)
- after independence, seeking truth and justice

Greek

The Argonautika (Apollonios Rhodios)
The Story of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece
Farewell Anatolia (Dido Sotiriou)
- a panoramic tale of the end of Greek Asia Minor
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (Robert B. Strassler)
- stupendously annotated and enhanced
*Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Apostolos Doxiadis)
- a novel of obsession and mathematics

Hebrew

Hindi

Tomb of Sand (Geetanjali Shree)
- from family comedy to the politics of partition

Hungarian

Icelandic

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Javanese

*On Thrones of Gold (James R. Brandon)
Three Javanese Shadow Plays

Korean

Malayalam

*The Legends of Khasak (O.V. Vijayan)
- interwoven stories of life and death in a South Indian village

Mandarin

The Stolen Bicycle (Wu Ming-Yi)
- a spiralling exploration of memory and history in Taiwan

Norwegian

Persian

Polish

Russian

Sanskrit

Much Ado About Religion (Bhatta Jayanta)
- a Sanskrit religious drama from 900 AD
Once the Buddha Was a Monkey: Jatakamala (Arya Sura)
- morality tales about lives of the Buddha

Serbo-Croatian

Spanish

Swedish

Tamil

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House (Ambai)
- short stories celebrating the lives of Indian women
Women Dreaming (Salma)
- a divorce in a poor Muslim village in Tamil Nadu

Turkish

Uzbek

*Manaschi (Hamid Ismailov)
- a Kyrgyz story, modern and traditional

Vietnamese

Yiddish