In translation

The Books of Jacob is a book about the internet. That is to say, it’s a response to the experience of encountering information online, and realising as a result that ‘many things remain quietly connected’, as Tokarczuk writes in her postscript. This realisation in turn gives rise to the notion of the system as a whole, a kind of totality – everything that has happened ‘alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.’

The Last One takes us with Fatima as she builds both an individual and collective identity through old and new connections and orientations.

Lemon begins like a conventional crime novel – there’s a detective interrogating a suspect, trying to pin the murder of a young woman onto an obviously vulnerable young man.

Stanišić’s books play with time as much as they play with fantasy, which are more entangled than one might suspect, but perhaps understandably so for someone like Stanišić, or someone like me, that is to say: children born into Yugoslavia and made refugees by the genocidal war that followed its fracturing.

You like the idea of going back and choosing a better path, or at least a fresh one. But, as you read Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering and make choices within it, you feel heavy with apprehension wrought from experience. Do different decisions lead to a different you?

One of the challenges in trying to describe what goes on in this story is that so much takes place in the interstitial spaces, the breach between what happens and what can be said about it – even what can be remembered.

Japanese author Sayaka Murata erupted onto the world stage in 2016 with the release of Convenience Store Woman, a novel which sold over a 1.4 million copies. As is often the case with non-Western authors who achieve sudden global recognition, the depth and breadth of her oeuvre was downplayed in favour of a narrative of overnight success. Easier to sell the story of an unknown author who has walked out of a vacuum and just begun.

Vernon Subutex follows a theme set in earlier books by Despentes: the status quo sucks, but we’re all complicit in it one way or another, regardless of our political leanings, sometimes even in spite of them.

Pity the poor writer whose fate is to be harried with opportunities and accolades. Erpenbeck’s deadpan portrayal of herself as a passive yet accommodating figure, somewhat nonplussed by the attention, makes a substantial claim.

for Léger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Léger’s extraordinary short books. Profoundly recondite, they are also deeply moving. Léger understands the literary power of the image and of narrative; the thing and its multiple renderings through mediation. This flickering between the real and its representation, between subject and object, is central to the effect of Léger’s triptych. It is not surprising, then, that the three subjects of her triptych are all associated with the representational power of the visual image and of (self-) performance.