If you’re a Patreon supporter at the $10 or higher level, you’ll be able to vote on the book for season 18, so sign up today!

This week’s music is “” by Los Campesinos!

You can watch all previous seasons of TMR on our .

¹ó´Ç±ô±ô´Ç·ÉÌýÌýÌýandÌýÌýfor random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,Ìý, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especiallyÌýÌý,Ìýand her forthcomingÌý

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

This week’s music is “Simulation Swarm” by Big Thief.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 22nd, 9am ET) which will cover through page 136 in Never Did the Fire and page 152 in Catching Fire live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on ourÌý.

¹ó´Ç±ô±ô´Ç·ÉÌýÌýÌýandÌýÌýfor random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,Ìý, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especiallyÌýÌý,Ìýand her forthcomingÌý

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

This week’s music is “It Was Us” by Arms and Sleepers.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 1st) live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on ourÌý.

¹ó´Ç±ô±ô´Ç·ÉÌýÌýÌýandÌýÌýfor random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,Ìý, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especiallyÌýÌý,Ìýand her forthcomingÌý

This week’s music is “Monday” by The Regrettes.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 1st) live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on ourÌý.

¹ó´Ç±ô±ô´Ç·ÉÌýÌýÌýandÌýÌýfor random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,Ìý, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especiallyÌýÌý,Ìýand her forthcomingÌý

Katie, Brian, and Chad will be back live on May 25th to cover up to page 68 inÌýNever Did the FireÌýand to page 78 inÌýCatching Fire.

This week’s music is “No Blade of Grass” from the new(ish) Bodega album.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

¹ó´Ç±ô±ô´Ç·ÉÌýÌýÌýandÌýÌýfor random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,Ìý, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especiallyÌýÌý,Ìýand her forthcomingÌý

Before getting into the books for this season, we have a couple of announcements. First off, we now have a , so please please follow us.

Also, following the trend of podcasts everywhere, we’ve launched a with some really fun bonuses for supporters, including access to a Discord channel, a book from my personal library, merchandise, a chance to vote on future seasons, and an opportunity to come on an episode. The funds from this will go to get Brian and Katie microphones, help support them for doing this every week, and, if all goes well, we’ll be able to put on a special TMR event/party this fall. Thanks in advance for your support, and we promise it’ll be worth your while.

Now, on to the books!

Many of you will recognize the manÌý (or his hands?) in the photo to the left as Daniel Hahn, translator, writer, editor, critic, and literary citizen extraordinaire, who was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2020, won the International Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007 (for José Eduardo Agualusa’sÌýThe Book of Chameleons) and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017 (again for an Agualusa book,ÌýA General Theory of Oblivion), and set up the Translators Association First Translation Prize. He was the national program director for the British Centre for Literary Translation, teaches workshops and seminars on a very regular basis, and is affiliated with every great translator-centric organization.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Seriously, Danny is one of a kind, a true ambassador for international literature, and one of the nicest and most talented translators out there. If you ever have a chance to meet him, or watch him on a panel, or attend one of his workshops—do it!

There are any number of books Danny’s translated that would be great for the podcast (like the bio of Arsène Wenger perhaps?! Go Gunners!), but this two-book package that just came out from Charco Press is IDEAL.

When Danny agreed to translateÌýÌýby Diamela Eltit, he also agreed to write a “translator’s diary”‘ on Charco’s site about the experience, giving readers the opportunity to get a glimpse behind the curtain as he worked his way through this quite experimental novel. That blog became Catching Fire, which came out at the same time as the Eltit, and is the perfect companion piece for this season.

So, instead of reading one difficult book, we’re going to try an experiment and read both ÌýandÌýÌýsimultaneously. There isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the novel and Danny’s diary, but I think that we’ll be able to bounce ideas off of the two texts in a very interesting way. Also, given that these books are relatively short, the per-week reading burden for this season is quite low . . . Which is good, because I’ve tried to read Eltit several times in the past and . . . her work was way beyond my comprehension at the time.

That said,Ìý sounds right up my alley:

A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit gets renewed attention in the English language in a novel of breakdowns. Holed up together, old, ill, and untethered from the revolutionary action that defined them, a couple’s bonds dissolve in their loss of a child and their loss of belief in an idea. What is there left to have faith in when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation?

There are four other Eltit books available in English translation: Sacred Cow, translated by Amanda Hopkinson (Serpent’s Tail, 1995),ÌýThe Fourth World, translated by Dick Gerdes (University of Nebraska, 1995), E. Luminata, translated by Ronald Christ (Lumen Books, 1997), and Custody of the Eyes, translated by Helen Lane and Ronald Christ (Lumen Books, 2005). She’s received a number of big prizes over the course of her career, including, most recently, the Chilean National Prize for Literature (2018), Carlos Fuentes Prize (2020), and the FIL Award (2021).

I don’t know much more about her, although I’ve always thought of her as a true cult author—one who has had a large influence on the more avant-garde writers, such as Mónica Ramón Ríos and Carlos Labbe. Which is why I’m particularly excited to dig into this. Katie and Brian will explain Eltit to me, I’ll get to learn a lot about an author I feel like I should really love, and we get to talk to and about one of my favorite translation people.

So here’s the schedule! (Dates are for the live , the audio will be available approximately a day later.)

:ÌýÌýNever Did the FireÌý1-20;ÌýCatching FireÌý1-24

:ÌýNFÌý21-44;ÌýCF 25-52

: Bonus Episode

: NFÌý45-68; CF 53-78

: NFÌý69-90; CF 79-105

June 8: NF 91-108; CFÌýÌý106-130

June 15: NF 109-136; CF 131-154

June 22: NFÌý137-156; CF 155-186

Get your copies now, and get ready! And if you like what we’ve done in the past, please consider supporting us through our .

How did you come to Dead Girls?

Annie McDermott: In fact, came to me. Chris Andrews, who translated—brilliantly—Selva’s first novel, , was too busy to take it on, so Carolina from Charco Press asked me to do it. She gave me a copy of the original after we met up in London one evening, and I remember reading the opening pages on the tube on my way home, among the discarded McDonald’s packaging and dozing office-workers, and getting shivers down my spine because it was so extraordinary.

Why should people read this book?

AM: Because it puts gender violence under the microscope and shows you what it’s made of—all the ugly component parts, wriggling around on the slide in full view. Nothing in this book is abstract: it’s all real, it’s all there on display, which is what makes reading it such a visceral and unforgettable experience.

What did you learn in the process of translating this book?

AM: In a way, I felt like I was translating for the very first time when I began work on . The stakes seemed so high—these were real women, real stories, real lives and deaths. Because of that, the accuracy of the translation seemed more crucial than ever, and my early drafts were quite wooden because I was clinging so tightly to the original. But as I carried on working, I learnt all over again that translating involves being faithful to so many things at once, like the rhythm and tone and emotional weight of each sentence, and that to achieve this you sometimes have to loosen your grip on the original.

What specific elements of style/structure/voice were the most challenging/rewarding about this project?

AM: The sparseness of the prose was a great challenge and, by the end, a great thrill—learning from Selva how much you can do with very few words, as long as they’re the right ones and in the right places.

If someone loved Dead Girls, what would youÌýrecommend they read next?

AM: I edited this book, so I’m biased, but I’d say this even if I hadn’t: , by the Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández, translated by the inimitable Julia Sanches and published last month by And Other Stories. Set in an unnamed Central American country, it tells the story of several generations of women struggling to get on with their lives in the wake of a civil war. Like Dead Girls, it goes beyond the headlines and statistics to explore everyday reality for individual women in a corrupt, patriarchal and unequal society. Both books are preoccupied with historical memory and seem to be presenting themselves as a kind of alternative account, with a different focus and on a different scale, and telling a different kind of truth.

by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott ()

Yesterday, on Twitter, I promised that the rest of this month’s posts on new books in translation would be way more positive, but, well, sorry everyone—I momentarily forgot which books I was planning on writing about today (and next week). Let’s kick this off with a page from the “epilogue” to Dead Girls, which also serves as the book’s main thesis:

The new year began a month ago. In that time, at least ten women have been killed for being women. I say at least because these are the names that appeared in the papers, the ones that counted as news.

Mariela Bustos, stabbed twenty-two times, in Las Caleras, Córdoba. Marina Soledad Da Silva, beaten and thrown down a well, inn Nemesio Parma, Misiones. Zulma Brochero, knifed in the forehead, and Arnulfa Ríos, shot, both in Río Segundo, Córdoba. Paola Tomé, strangled, in Junín, Buenos Aires. Priscila Lafuente, beaten to death, half-burned on a barbecue and then thrown in a stream, in Berazategui. Carolina Arcos, killed with a blow to the head, on a building site in Rafaela, Santa Fe. Nanci Molina, stabbed, in Presidencia de la Plaza, Chaco. Luciana Rodríguez, beaten to death, in the capital of Mendoza. Querlinda Vásquez, strangled, in Las Heras, Santa Cruz.

We’re in summer now and it’s hot, almost like the morning of November 16th, 1986, when, in a way, this book began to be written, when the dead girl crossed my path. Now I’m forty and, unlike her and the thousands of women murdered in my country since then, I’m still alive. Purely a matter of luck.

The most frustrating aspect of this book is also its main point: women are murdered, over and over and over, and justice is never served. (All this summer I’ve had the opening line to A Frolic of His OwnÌýstuck in my head: “Justice? —You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”) And in Dead Girls, you don’t even get the law.

The book centers around three murders that took place in “the interior” of Argentina in the 1980s, when Selva Almada was a teenager. Andrea Danne was stabbed to death in her own bed, without putting up a struggle. María Luisa Quevedo went missing in December 1983 and was found raped and strangled “on a patch of wasteland on the outskirts of the city. No one was tried for the murder.” And Sarita Mundín disappeared on March 12th, 1988, and declared dead when remains were found nine months later “on the banks of the Tcalamochita river [. . .] Another unresolved case.”

Over the course of the book, Almada talks to living relatives of the three girls, Andrea Danne’s boyfriend at the time of her murder, even a medium, but nothing is ever uncovered, the murderers are never found out, never arrested, never tried, never convicted. She details a number of suspects, of “likely” possibilities, all without resolution. This lack of closure is taken to an extreme with Sarita Mundín. With the advent of DNA testing, her bones were exhumed and tested. The body her sister thought was Sarita’s wasn’t. She could still be alive, although that’s not the consolation for her sister that one might hope for—instead, her sister believes that she was sold into the sex trade.

Bleak and unforgiving,ÌýDead GirlsÌýdraws attention to the secondary horror of violence in society. Not only are woman constantly in physical danger (and not just women—this book could be written about Black Americans or members of the trans community or, god, I can’t finish this list), but their murders are often left unresolved or, way too frequently, uninvestigated.

One other note: In a way,ÌýDead GirlsÌýandÌýMothers Don’tÌýby Katixa Agirre (available in Basque and Spanish, forthcoming in English) are mirrors of one another. In the case of Dead Girls, it’s billed as fiction, but is almost entirely true. (And reads more like an investigation than an invention.) In the case ofÌýMothers Don’t, it reads like an autofictional true-crime book about a woman who kills her child, but it’s completely fabricated. Both deal with tough subjects in differing ways, and would be interesting to read in conversation with each other. (In a couple years when Mothers Don’t comes out, that is.)

*

Ìýby Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson () is the ninth book of Mabanckou’s to appear in English (although maybe only the eighth to be available in the U.S.? I’m confused by the status of Black Bazaar) and his works generally receive a decent amount of review coverage and buzz. Personally, I still loveÌýÌýthe best, but it’s probably because that was the first one I read . . . I haven’t seen this yet, but it totally fits with my “death” theme for this post:

Mabanckou’s riotous new novel, The Death of Comrade President, returns to the 1970s milieu of his awarding-winning novelÌýBlack Moses, telling the story of Michel, a daydreamer whose life is completely overthrown when, in March 1977, just before the arrival of the rainy season, Congo’s Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered. Thanks to his mother’s kinship with the president, not even naive Michel can remain untouched. And if he is to protect his family, Michel must learn to lie.

Moving seamlessly between the small-scale worries of everyday life and the grand tragedy of postcolonial politics, Mabanckou explores the nuances of the human soul through the naive perspective of a boy who learns the realities of life—and how much must change for everything to stay the same.

*

Ìýby Davide Sisto, translated from the Italian by Bonnie McClellan-Broussard ()Ìýsounds fascinating:

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can’t avoid death; digital ghosts—electronic traces of the dead—appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. InÌýOnline Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death.

Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death—including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones—and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people’s last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person’s account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

It also reminds me that a) I need to clear out my browser history more often, and delete my Twitter at least once a mental breakdown, and b) that theÌýBlack MirrorÌýepisode “” is trippy as shit.

But what I really want to write is about . I didn’t know Randall very well, but there are few human beings I think on with as much tenderness and respect and admiration as I do Randall. We met in Marfa in 2016 when we were both on Lannan Fellowships, and, in addition to a few interactions at readings and receptions, all of us who were there at the time (Amitava Kumar and Timothy Donnelly were also there) had the most amazing going away party for him. Aside from him warning me about (first I’d heard of them! but Randall was nervous about being out too late with these things around—and ) and telling me to email him next time I’m in Chapel Hill, I don’t remember any of the specifics of that conversation. Nevertheless, my memory is steeped in a warm glow, a sense of rightness and goodness. (I also very clearly remember his smile. Not just from that day, but from all our encounters. He had a really fantastic smile.)Ìý In the back of my mind, I’ve assumed for years that I would see him again someday in Chapel Hill and hang out. (And that I would read the giant novel he was working on in Marfa as soon as it was published.) And then, I found out, through John Keene’s social media, that Randall had passed away.

And as much as I want to rail against social media, and am afraid to read this book because of the philosophical issues surrounding death that it inevitably must bring up (my next birthday isn’t too far away, which makes this primetime for mortality thinking), I do have to say that the tributes and photos and memories being shared about Randall are really touching.

(There will be a for Randall on September 20th at 4pm eastern.)

*

by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund ()Ìýis maybe the most timely (?) book in translation to come out this month. I mean, anything about the postal service . . . (Although I wish it was “Long Live the Muted Post Horn! W.A.S.T.E. 4EVA!”)

Ellinor, a thirty-five-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she’s not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she’s ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.

This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Hjorth’s trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

I wasn’t personally as intoÌýÌýas many others, but this sounds a bit more up my alley . . .

Josh Cook is the author of the novelÌýAn Exaggerated Murder, published by Melville House in March 2015. His fiction and other work has appeared inÌýThe Coe Review,ÌýEpicenter Magazine,ÌýThe Owen Wister Review,ÌýBarge,ÌýPlume Poetry AnthologyÌý2012 and 2013, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in the 2011 and 2012 Cupboard Fiction Contest. He is a bookseller with Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Ìý

Ìýby Ariana Harwicz, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff (Charco Press)

We know from books like The Awakening what is supposed to happen when a woman discovers she does not want the family life society offered to her after she has already started that family life. She uncovers her artistic potential and then decides what value her old life has in relation to the life she can now imagine for herself, and then, she either returns to that life in some form of reconciliation and/or defeat or she swims until she can’t see land.

We know from books, movies, TV shows, and other media what it means when a man acts out against the expectations of family life set by his society; when he drinks too much, when he sleeps with the neighbor, when he neglects his child, when he runs out into the fields and forests like he’s been possessed by a druidic spirit seeking the real name of the god of roots and stones. These are the actions of an artist, of a genius, of someone who understands how limiting that family life society has offered is, how that life limits all of us even those—or especially those—who believe they are satisfied within it, and is fighting back, perhaps even waging guerilla war against the state, striking from hideouts deep in the jungle or high in the mountains; a hero even, one who has risked himself and his family to loosen the fetters binding all of us. We look at the destruction in his wake with a certain kind of realist’s awe, wishing for fewer broken things of course, but knowing—just knowing—that genius bears breakage. And that breakage is worth it. Collateral damage.

We can’t really, truly know if we want children until we have them. We can’t really, truly know what kind of parents we will be until we are parents. Educated guesses at best. Sometimes not even educated guesses but guesses forced by circumstance. Guesses can be right, but they can also be wrong. Right guesses and wrong guesses both have consequences.

But what if you’re not an artist? What if you chafe against the confines of the family life offered to you by society, strain against those bonds, struggle for the freedom to do something else and be something else, and in the process you don’t discover untapped artistic potential, you don’t discover a more meaningful possible life, you don’t find a landmark you can swim to or drown while trying? What if you attempt all the actions associated with artistic genius—at least when men do them—and in the end discover that you just did not want a child but now have a child?

You could describe Die, My Love as a conventional gender swap with a slight twist; the artistic genius is not a man but a woman and is—twist—not actually an artistic genius. You could describe Die, My Love as a response to The Awakening, a different kind of cynicism or even a direct challenge to that modernist veneration of the artist.

“I hear the chainsaw.�

Either one of those versions of Die, My Love is a challenging book, maybe even a dangerous book. But Harwicz has also thrown a surprising stylistic frame around her plot, telling her story of a woman and mother struggling against her life with the prose and pacing of a horror novel. Her affair is presented as a demonic possession, but it’s unclear who is being possessed by who. An injured dog is shot off page and you’re not sure whether the trigger was pulled more by mercy or malice. Even when the protagonist just kinda runs out into a field and has a weird time there, the prose makes you feel as though fingers might crack through the earth and drag her to hell.

How familiar should a translation be to speakers of a different language? Should the book feel recognizable to them once it is translated into their language? Should they feel welcomed? Should they feel comfortable? As general practice, I don’t have a satisfying answer, but the case of Die, My Love the answers are: What’s the point of being recognized, No one is welcome, and Comfortable is the worst thing you can feel. Die, My Love posed a formidable translation challenge to Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff. To be true to the text, they needed to let the prose feel like a hair shirt, but they also needed to keep people reading, to open a few entrance points for those of us who didn’t already trust Harwicz. To be honest, it took me a fairly long time to get into the book. It wasn’t until I understood the style as horror novel prose, that I realized the project and greatness of the book. In their translation, Moses and Orloff essentially had to string a tight rope for me to teeter along from my reading expectations to the book’s project. A bridge would have been a lie. A chasm an impossibility. They had to preserve the seeds of unease Harwicz planted without making me so uneasy I gave up and they did.

And because of the seeds of unease planted over the course of the book, by the end it is impossible to let your guard down. The moment things look like maybe they seem to be going OK enough for all involved, it feels like someone has sneaked up behind you. You are immediately prepared for a disaster, something worse than anything you’ve read to date, and now you are doing the author’s work for her; the cruelty inherent in your own imagination is creating the types of images Harwicz wrote earlier in the book. At some point you notice the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up and have been standing up for some time. At some point you realize the only way to end the anxiety you’re feeling, give the fear and stress a chance to drain out of you like puss, is to stop reading Die, My Love, set it down and walk away either for a break or because you’ve finished it. Or maybe you feel as though you can’t even just walk away, that the only effective way to release what has become contained, is to run as fast as you can through the forest hoping the branches cutting your skin lance the boil and release puss, while also hoping you can make your run and get your cuts without losing an eye. There’s leading a reader to understand the emotions of the characters and then there’s making the reader feel them.

But you can’t really walk away from your child. Even if it’s just for a few minutes, even if you’ve left your child with their father who should be just as responsible for them as you are, the hairs on the back of your neck don’t lie down. And even if you do find a way to close the book and never open it again, there will be consequences; personal, emotional, and social. And even if that is actually the best decision for you and even if that is actually the best decision for your child, there will be consequences; personal, emotional, and social.

A brutal heart beats at the center of Die, My Love. Pumping brutal blood through brutal veins to brutal brains thinking brutal thoughts brutally. And then just beyond the edge of page, surrounding the covers of the book, unwritten by Harwicz is the solution to the problem her book poses, that state of being in which none of the suffering she has depicted happens. All we need is a world that assumes men and women have the same inherent humanity.

“I heard the chainsaw.�

( copyrighted by .)