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If you loved The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, read My Life at the Bottom by Linda Bondestam, translated from the Swedish by A.A. Prime
At the height of the pandemic, The Ministry for the Future helped me imagine what the world might look like during and after climate disaster. In the midst of multiple concurrent catastrophes, it gave me hope to picture an existence past the inescapable now. My Life at the Bottom does the same thing for little tykes, painting a hopeful and beautiful picture of the future while acknowledging the ugly present.
—Ho Ying Fan, Managing Editor (the spreadsheets guy)
If you loved My Part of Her by Javad Djavahery, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, read Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe
I read Madonna in a Fur Coat, a 20th-century Turkish classic, one summer inside a train car from Vienna to Budapest and was left filled with a kind of alienation and nostalgia that burns your throat. The narrator Raif Efendi (who we follow through one long journal entry) is consumed with loss and regret, adrift in political disarray, and writes with longing and quiet passion, much like Djavahery's narrator. An amazing short novel for a bit of summertime sadness.
If you loved Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, read Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang (out September 27)
There's a lot of value in extremely close first-person perspectives—quite literally living in somebody else's shoes—especially if these subjects are commonly overlooked, hushed, or misunderstood. In a world like today’s where we're increasingly stuck in an echo chamber, I think the lens Qiu Miaojin and Kim Hye-jin provide through their characters are refreshing and absolutely crucial.
—Rio Hayashi, Editorial Assistant
If you loved Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region by Masha Gessen, read The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America by Javier Sinay, translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll
In 1929, the Soviet government set aside a mostly deserted piece of land in a far-flung region of the Soviet Union for settlement by Jews called Birobidzhan. Birobidzhan rapidly came to represent the hopes of Jewish Communists to create an autonomous Jewish region where all could be safe from persecution. Unfortunately, this was a dream that would not last long under Stalinist rule. In this haunting account of little-known Jewish history, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen investigates how this ill-fated search for home came to a close.
Javier Sinay, also a journalist by training, investigates a similar search for a Jewish homeland in a country far from the confines of Eastern Europe. The first Jewish agricultural settlement in Argentina, Moisés Ville was founded by a group of Jewish immigrants in the late 1880s. What makes Sinay’s historical investigation all the more compelling is the journalist’s own personal connection to the town and his focus on its particularly murderous past. After having discovered an article from 1947 by his great-grandfather detailing twenty-two murders that had occurred in Moisés Ville, Sinay opens the door on ambitious an exploration of Argentine Jewish history and identity.
—Auriane Benabou, Editorial Assistant
If you loved The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, read Bug by Giacomo Sartori, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall
Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad takes many of those characters (along with their lovers, enemies, and descendants) into a speculative, immediate future in which a social media juggernaut allows people to access a collective consciousness—for the low price of uploading all their history, memories, feelings, and secrets to the cloud. Never enter a candy house, warns one character—and yet for many, the idea is irresistible.
In Giacomo Sartori’s wildly inventive follow-up to his comic masterpiece I Am God, the title character, Bug, is an artificial intelligence designed by the older brother of our narrator, the deaf younger son of a family of misfit savants straight out of a Wes Anderson movie, in order to help the family climb out of dire financial straits. But at a certain point, any creation defies its creator. Bug is a literary descendant of Shakespeare’s Puck, bent on mischief. Like in Egan’s madcap storytelling, at the heart of any Sartori story are characters that are so pulsingly alive and real and compelling that the novel becomes its own virtual reality device.
—Nathan Rostron, Editorial and Marketing Director
If you loved Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen, translated from the Danish by Anna Halager or The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter, read Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker (out October 4)
If you’re horny, angry about reproductive rights being stripped, or want to feel empowered, you gotta read Blood Red. It’s an erotic, blush-inducing novel about a woman in her thirties going living her best life after going through a break-up while grappling with the contradictions inherent in life: choice and consequence, love and hate, pain and ecstasy. The narrator navigates these paradoxes, sometimes messily, not always with ease, but always on her terms. I just finished reading Last Night in Nuuk, also written in a stream-of-consciousness, confessional style, and I loved the way the characters, especially Fia, deal with these same paradoxes and conflicts in their individual searches for self-discovery.
The body, especially the female body, is forever being politicized, scrutinized, judged, shamed, and controlled, but in Blood Red, the narrator emphatically refuses to comply with these terms. A rapturous, glorious depiction of bodily autonomy and sexual freedom, Blood Red is a fever dream of a novel about individual choice. I couldn't stop thinking about The Book of X while reading Blood Red and how Sarah Rose Etter centers physicality and corporeality, subverting the notion that the female body is viewed first and foremost as a thing to be objectified and controlled.
—Alison Gore, Associate Editor and Grants Manager