Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, who writes about modern Jewish thought and Orientalism. She has a PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago and is the Associate Director of Academic Affairs at the London center ofĚýCAPA: The Global Education Network.

Ěýby Alisa Ganieva, translated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio (Russia, Deep Vellum)

At the beginning of Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom, translated by Carol Apollonio, a group of young people ask an old man for directions to a dacha somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow and end up buying homemade wine from him, after he gives them the following directions: “Go straight down this path, then turn left when you get to the turnstile, before the fence turn again, this time to the right? Got it?” A young man in the group then repeats the salient details of the directions: “Straight, left, right.” After which, “an old net bag appeared out of nowhere, and the man extracted from it a large bottle with a homemade label showing the letter X, the rest indecipherable.” Patya, the bride of Bride and Groom, also among the group, is Dagestani, and so her Moscow friends, with whom she is looking for the dacha (in order to attend a party) assume she will not drink the wine: “She doesn’t drink. That’s how it is in her country . . . Islam. Right, Patya?” Patya does in fact drink, but does not bother correcting her friends, nor does she bother correcting the ludicrous stereotypes some of the people she encounters at the party have regarding people from her region (which they also often misidentify). The party plays out in a surreal fashion, including a séance and an encounter between Patya and Rinat, a sexually menacing figure, who tells Patya of a strange dream he has had, which he interpreted to mean she would attend the party. When Patya refers to someone else at the party as “full of himself,” Rinat asks, “Might Yuri have simply drunk some wine and come to know truth … Unlike us, he doesn’t try to distinguish himself from God.” Rinat then references a poet who declared “I am God!” and whose students, thinking he was possessed by Satan, tried to stab him, but ended up stabbing themselves. Although Patya is scared of Rinat, and thinks he is crazy, at the end of the chapter, when Patya is trying to get outside and the people holding the séance think she is a spirit and will not open the door, Rinat helps her escape, and Patya gives him her hand, stating: “He would not let me stumble.”

This first chapter, suffused with Sufism, vignettes capturing the erasures endured by Russia’s Islamic minorities and complicated gender dynamics touching on selfhood and agency, is a masterful beginning to an intriguing novel. The old man (a Sufi guide, the first of several in the book), who sells Patya and her friends wine, gives directions that imply many different paths—the turnstile, the fence, “turn again”—therefore underscoring the right path, the áą­a°ůīḳa, the Sufi path to God. The wine itself is both another Sufi marker, esoterically pointing the reader toward the tradition of “intoxicated Sufism,” as well as a device to mark the distance between Patya’s true self and how people perceive her. (Wine will also return at the end of the novel, bringing the drunkenness full circle.) The Sufi poet mentioned by Rinat, who loses his individuality in God and therefore comes close to (achieves?) heresy, serves as a foil for Patya, who struggles to preserve her individuality in the face of family and cultural expectations, but also longs to lose it, when she meets Marat, her Groom.

The exoteric plot of the novel follows Patya and Marat, both of whom return to their hometown in Dagestan from Moscow, under pressure from their respective families to marry. Marat’s parents have already booked the reception hall—he just needs to find a bride. Patya’s family has set her up with a succession of potential suitors, but she has rejected them all. When they finally meet, it feels inevitable that they will fall in love, but their families do not approve. Their hometown meanwhile is embroiled in politics and intrigue, hinging on the presence of Salafism and political corruption. Eventually, their marriage is given the go-ahead, but the murder of an old friend of Marat’s, who has declared himself an agnostic, changes the course of events, and the love story dissolves, the esoteric Sufi text coming to the fore. Throughout the novel, a shadowy figure, the local big shot, both mafia boss and Sufi ˛őłó̲˛ą˛â°ě̲łó̲, presides in the background—proof positive that the “functioning system” that Patya declares the people want is nowhere to be seen.

The story is told through chapters that alternate between Patya and Marat. Patya’s chapters are first person, Marat’s chapters third person. The first time the narrative leaps from first to third person (the beginning of the second chapter) is somewhat disorienting, but the pattern soon becomes clear. This choice of voice(s) plays a significant role in how effective the novel is, as it deepens the exploration of gender and selfhood. Marat, as the man, holds much of the power in the relationship, and reading about him in the third person makes him somewhat opaque—like Patya, we wonder about him, and perhaps cannot see him as clearly as we see Patya. The chapters focused on Patya, in contrast, bring us much closer to her, as she traverses familial expectations and her own desires. I am not sure if this dismantles or reinforces the power imbalance, but it invites the reader to think about love within the confines of gender.

Bride and Groom uses a love story to explore the possibilities of selfhood for a young Dagestani woman, to develop an extended Sufi meditation, and to engage with the complex political and cultural realities of contemporary Dagestan. Readers (Americans in particular) would do well to acknowledge what the novel beautifully illustrates: that there are many different Islams, each infused with local particularities, and that it is often impossible to tell truth from heresy, self from other/God, spiritual guide from charlatan.

The gender disparity in terms of women in translation has been fairly well documented—see the tumblr and all of the work has been doing—but it’s worth reiterating some of the primary numbers.

Using our own Translation Database, I calculated that between 2008 and 2014 only 26.6% of all the works of fiction and poetry published in translation were written by women. That’s pretty damn appalling.

I still might be missing some 2015 titles, but at this moment, I have logged in 552 original works of fiction and poetry in translation, 165 written by women. I don’t think this is a reason to celebrate, but at 29.9%, that is a slight uptick over the average . . .

Leaving off all of the books by women that I included on my previous lists (post listing all lists is forthcoming), and ones that I’m planning on including in the future (this will never end!), here are seven books by women from 2015 that are worth reading.

by Naja Marie Aidt, translated from the Danish by K. E. Semmel (Open Letter)

Given that this is the first Open Letter book I’ve included on these lists, I hope everyone reading this can acknowledge that I’m doing my best to include as many different presses, writers, translators as possible, and not just promoting the mind-blowingly amazing books that we’ve been bringing out.

This is Naja’s first novel and her second book to be translated into English. (The first, Baboon, translated by Denise Newman, won the PEN Translation Prize last year.) It’s a book I considered including on the “noir” list that’s forthcoming, but with all the competition for that—do you have any idea how many crime titles are published every year?—I thought it would make more sense to include her here.

Rock, Paper, Scissors centers around Thomas, a stationery-store owner whose dad dies in prison. Going through some of his belongings, Thomas discovers a mysterious package that could radically change his family’s fortunes. But as the book develops, more and more awful things start happening to him . . .

You can find out more about Naja by reading

by Marianne Fritz, translated from the Germany by Adrian Nathan West (Dorothy Project)

(What’s below appeared verbatim in an earlier post, but I have nothing new to add.)

This may well be the most intriguing jacket copy I’ve read in a while.

The Weight of Things is the first book, and the first translated book, and possibly the only translatable book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948–2007). For after winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a 10,000-page literary project called “The Fortress,” creating over her lifetime elaborate, colorful diagrams and typescripts so complicated that her publisher had to print them straight from her original documents. A project as brilliant as it is ambitious and as bizarre as it is brilliant, it earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce no less than Henry Darger, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.

My knee-jerk reaction when I see something referred to as “untranslatable” is to cry Nonsense! and bust out all sort of practical versus theoretical reasons why everything’s translatable, just maybe not in the way the speaker has in mind.

But then I Googled Marianne Fritz’s later works and found this:

Yep. That. Amazing.

by Alisa Ganieva, translated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio (Deep Vellum)

We have a full review of this forthcoming, so I won’t say too much here. Basically this is a genre-bending novel about what happens when rumors spread that the Russian government is going to erect a wall to block off the Caucasus republics from the rest of the country. (Shades of Trump!) It’s also one of the only (the only?) book from Dagestan to be published in English translation.

Not too many months ago, I listened to the audiobook recording of Masha Gessen’s The Brothers about the Boston Bombers. It also involves a lot about Dagestan and I totally fell in love with the way the reader pronounced “Makhachkala.” Weirdly, that got me interested in this book . . . Sometimes the way we find things to read is so random.

by Laura Restrepo, translated from the Spanish by Ernest Mestre-Reed (AmazonCrossing)

I just got a copy of this and hope to read it over the holiday break. (Although I’ll probably spend most of my vacation reading out 2016 titles and prepping for my world lit class . . . sigh. There’s just not enough time for pleasure reading anymore.) Anyway, Restrepo is one of those “AmazonCrossing coups” that I’ve mentioned in past articles and interviews. Sure, a lot of what Amazon does are genre books, romances, thrillers, etc., but they also do a handful of big name literary authors who have been overlooked by more established publishers. Such as Restrepo.

You might remember Restrepo from last summer’s Women’s World Cup of Literature where her novel, Delirium, lost in the semifinals to Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine.

Hot Sur is a more recent novel that sounds dark and edgy:

MarĂ­a Paz is a young Latin American woman who, like many others, has come to America chasing a dream. When she is accused of murdering her husband and sentenced to life behind bars, she must struggle to keep hope alive as she works to prove her innocence. But the dangers of prison are not her only obstacles: gaining freedom would mean facing an even greater horror lying in wait outside the prison gates, one that will stop at nothing to get her back.

This is one of those titles that I have a feeling certain booksellers would be rallying around had it come out from someone else. Which makes me feel bad for the book.

by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent (Open Letter)

This book made and since I can’t resist the idea of having lists inside of lists (inside of lists inside of . . . ), I’m just going to quote from his write up:

War, So Much War, the latest translation of her work following volumes of short stories and the darkly sublime novel Death in Spring, is a phantasmagorical journey through a landscape of war. People disappear into the sea. Cat men made out of broken parts try to make their way in the world. A kind of anti-picturesque episodic adventure, the novel makes sense of war through the nonreal, makes us understand that in the worst circumstances the surreal is the every-day as well as the place people escape to because there is nowhere else to hide.

This book has been getting some great year-end play from booksellers and other critics. As one of my all-time favorite writers, I couldn’t be happier. Go Rodoreda! (Now if only I could find a way to learn more about Catalan culture . . . like by attending the Barcelona-Arsenal Champions League match in mid-March at Camp Nou . . . Maybe I should start a “gofundme” for this! “Send me to see some fĂştbol, I’ll bring back some Catalan lit!”)

by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich (FSG)

I really like when Jonathan Sturgeon is given the space to write longer pieces about books for Flavorwire. He’s a very insightful, thoughtful, well-read critic, as can be evidenced in about Ulitskaya’s latest:

Because the novel is flat and fast, it’s difficult to describe the next several hundred pages. I’d rather given you an example of how it reads. But first I will say that it does not just dutifully work out the fates of our three young men, their sexualities, marriages, educations, occupations, travels, interpersonal struggles, and deaths; rather, it undutifully resolves these things. The plot meanders. The narrator ice skates along the novel’s surface. And as the book expands, it does become a big (green) tent, one that deals the fates of assorted minor characters, of what the narrator bafflingly calls “C-list extras.” The problem, though, is that any extra would be thrilled to be on the C-list; accordingly, the novel’s minor characters are always clambering in the limelight. (“Vera Samuilovna was crazy about endocrinology,” for instance.) Sometimes they ruin the shot.

Still, the book is often a joy to read. It is, if you will, crack. (Reminder: crack is bad for you.) But at least it is book crack and not TV crack. By this I do not mean that books are better than TV, although this is something I do believe. (I write about books.) What I mean is that The Big Green Tent, unlike some other big works of realism published this year, does not rely too much on TV tropes. Instead, it wins the reader’s attention with narrative art and (sometimes) ingenious language.

I considered including this in my spring class, but asking students to read a 570-page book in a week is begging for a student rebellion.

by Regina Ullmann, translated from the German by Kurt Beals (New Directions)

I don’t remember seeing a lot of coverage for this book when it first came out, which is both strange and disappointing. Her writing is weird in that way that a lot of literary readers and reviewers seem to enjoy. Robert Musil called her a “genius.” There are blurbs on the book jacket by Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse. Kurt Beals won a PEN Heim Translation Award for this. And here’s the opening of the title story:

Summer, but a younger summer than this one; the summer back then was no more than my equal in years. True, I still wasn’t happy, not happy to my core, but I had to be int he way that everyone is. The sun set me ablaze. It grazed on the green knoll where I sat, a knoll with an almost sacred form, where I had taken refuge from the dust of the country road. Because I was weary. I was weary because I was alone. This long country road before and behind me . . . The bends that it made around this knoll, the poplars—even heaven itself could not relieve it of its bleakness. I was ill at ease, because just a short way into my walk, this road had already dragged me into its misery and squalor. It was an uncanny country road. An all-knowing road. A road reserved for those who had been, in some way, left alone.

*

So go forth and read women in translation!

Which brings me to my new idea . . .

Instead of trying to come up with funny and interesting things to say about ten books every month (and which probably aren’t all the funny or interesting), instead I’m going to try and highlight three new and forthcoming titles every week and preface it with some sort of rant or whatever.

Since I’d rather just get to the books, my only “rant” for this week is about how stupid it is to start school before Labor Day. I’m sure some of you out there are still enjoying summer vacation—which is your god given right as an American—but my kids have been in school for two days and I taught my first class of the semester on Monday. Yes, Monday, when it was still August.

This is bullshit. It violates the cycle of life. The only standing significance of Labor Day is that it marks the end of summer. It’s an extended weekend where you’re allowed to reflect back on all the things you didn’t accomplish when it was warm out and get ready for football. After this weekend of lamentations and awareness that everything will die and that the snows aren’t that far off in the future, then you can go back to the classroom and try and learn things. It’s fundamentally impossible for a brain to retain new knowledge prior to Labor Day. I’m pretty certain that science will back me on that. And we wonder why our nation’s public school system is in shambles.

Translated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio (Deep Vellum)

This book came out back in June, but has shot up my to-read list thanks to Masha Gessen’s The Brothers. Gessen’s book about the so-called Boston Bombers is most interesting when it gets into the investigation and the way Chechens, and all immigrants, are viewed and treated in this country, but the first thing that jumped out at me when I started listening to this was how the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers was from Dagestan. This is a place I’ve never been, never really even thought of, and never read about. (Although I really love the way the woman reading the audio version of The Brothers pronounces Makhachkala. Such a wonderful name for a city. Ma-katch-ka-la.)

But now, thanks to Deep Vellum (who’s getting all the love this week), there’s actually a novel available from a Dagestan author! According to the jacket copy, it’s the first novel in English ever from Dagestan, which seems completely true.

I know next to nothing about the complicated history and situation in the Caucasus republics of Russia, but given the strife, the various conflicts with Russia, the fact that most people living there are Muslims—it’s a part of the world that I’d like to learn more about. Starting with this novel that’s set into motion by a rumor that Russia is going to build a wall to block off Dagestan from the rest of the country. Seems like a great plot point from which to launch a series of interesting observations of life in contemporary Makhachkala.

Translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker (New Directions)

Translated from the Indonesian by John H. McGlynn (Deep Vellum)

One oft-quoted cliché is that reading can take you to places and introduce you to peoples and cultures you’d otherwise not have access to. I generally don’t care much for this sort of sentiment—feels a bit like literary tourism—but with all the hype surrounding the two Eka Kurniawan books coming out this fall, I’ve become very curious about Indonesian literature. Also helps that in the past week I’ve received copies of both of these books, and that they both sound pretty damn good.

The shorthand description of Beauty Is a Wound is that it’s “Indonesian magical realism done right.” The opening lines have a sense of that: “One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst.”

Verso is bringing out another of his novels this fall, which will likely help Kurniawan gain some traction here in the States. And maybe, just maybe, this attention will carry over to Home, which won the Khatulistiwa Award—Indonesia’s most prestigious prize (and the only one I’ve ever heard of!)—in 2012 and will be available in English translation this October.

Here’s the opening lines of her book, just to compare: “Night had fallen, without complaint, without pretext. Like a black net enclosing the city, ink from a monster squid spreading across Jakarta’s entire landscape—the color of my uncertain future.”

Both books focus on Indonesian history, including the anti-communist massacre in the mid-1960s and the overthrow of Suharto in 1998, which is another compelling reason to read these two titles in tandem.

It’s also interesting that New Directions refers to Kurniawan’s book as being “inspired by Melville and Gogol,” whereas Deep Vellum claims Home is “reminiscent of War & Peace.” So many classic authors!