Foreign Language Books
Literature in Translation

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

Albanian

Arabic

Basque

Plants Don't Drink Coffee (Unai Elorriaga)
- intertwined stories about insects, rugby, love + carpentry

Bulgarian

Natural Novel (Georgi Gospodinov)
- a comedy in fragments

Chinese

Czech

War With the Newts (Karel Capek)
- sweeping science fiction satire

Danish

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

Hebrew

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

Norwegian

*Kristin Lavransdatter (Sigrid Undset)
- a family saga set in medieval Norway

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

Turkish

Vietnamese

Dumb Luck (Vu Trong Phung)
- a comic satire of late-colonial Vietnam
Novel Without a Name (Duong Thu Huong)
- a North Vietnamese soldier's story
*The Sorrow of War (Bao Ninh)
- a novel by a North Vietnamese soldier