Despite the harsh reality that Sprout has to face outside the coop, she doesn’t have to face it alone. While in the open grave, she meets Straggler, a mallard duck who also lives on the farm. Like Sprout, Straggler is a misfit, a wild duck among domesticated ones. He is allowed to stay on the farm, but he keeps his distance from the other ducks. Even though he isn’t able to convince the other animals to let Sprout stay on the farm, he is able to help her fulfill one wish: To sit on an egg and watch a baby hatch from it.

One day, while wandering the fields, she finds this egg and decides to sit on it until the mother returns. The mother never does, but when Straggler finds her, he agrees to stand guard while Sprout is brooding. The hen, of course, thinks this baby will be a chick. She also believes Straggler is under the mistaken impression that she laid the egg, but he really knows more about it than she realizes. In fact, before he meets a tragic end, he gives her advice on what to do with the hatchling.

Soon after the birth of Baby (as he is known in the novel’s earlier chapters), Sprout takes him back to the farm, where she learns that the chick is actually a duckling. As a result of this discovery, she endures further humiliation. “It’s a disgrace to the comb!” the rooster tells Sprout. “A ridiculous hen has made our kind the laughingstock of the barn.” Even the guard dog, who is intimidated by the rooster and his hen, taunts Sprout. “A chicken hatching a duck!” he says. “What a ridiculous sight!”

However, Sprout doesn’t let the other animals’ insults affect her this time.

Sprout’s thoughts were jumbled, but she was anything but ashamed. She had hatched her egg with all her being. She had wished for him to be born. She’d loved him from when he was inside the egg. She was never suspicious about what was inside. Sure, he’s a duck, not a chick. Who cares? He still knows I’m his mom!

Not only does this scene show Sprout’s determination to raise Baby in the face of hostility, but it also exhibits the strong bond that has already developed between the hen and the duckling.

However, as the story progresses, this bond is tested on more than one occasion. After Sprout and Baby move to the reservoir, the leader of the farmyard ducks tries several times to convince the hen to give up the duckling. This leader feels that if Baby doesn’t grow up as a domesticated duck with clipped wings, he will experience the same fate as Straggler. Sprout refuses to let Baby go, but as the duckling learns by himself how to swim and catch fish, they both begin to realize how different they really are.

These differences threaten their happiness in the novel’s later chapters, when Sprout starts calling the adolescent duck Greentop. “It did break Sprout’s heart to see Greentop with a brooding expression on his face. He had become moody from time to time after the leader had visited them in the reeds. These episodes recurred after his feathers changed color. Sprout asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t confide in her.” He finally tells her that he wants to join the brace of ducks at the farm. While this hurts Sprout, she allows it for the sake of his happiness. Although his brief return to the farm turns out to be a disaster, Greentop eventually becomes a strong, confident duck that makes her proud.

Meanwhile, Sprout and Greentop have to constantly move to avoid the relentless weasel. They are especially vulnerable because they lack the shelter of the farmyard and have to make their homes in reeds, rice paddies, and caves. Despite living on the run, though, mother and child become braver over time; at one point, Sprout even defends herself against the weasel’s attacks. Later, in the story’s climax, Sprout shows the weasel just how far a mother will go to take care of her children.

Although The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is heartbreaking at times, readers cannot help but admire Sprout’s strength and courage as she not only makes her wish come true, but as she honors the memory of her friend Straggler and helps Greentop fulfill his destiny. The sparse illustrations by Nomoco offer an elegant accompaniment to the story. However, it’s the combination of simple prose, beautifully translated by Chi-Young Kim, and colorful characters that really makes this novel an unforgettable experience. In conclusion, Sun-mi Hwang’s fable is a celebration of freedom and motherhood that both teenagers and adults will probably want to read more than once.

This is a review I’ve been sitting on a while and I apologize for that—but after a quick trip to NYC for a fantastic evening with Bulgarian authors and their readers at 192 Books, and before a whirlwind of Greek, Danish-Bulgarian, and Latin American events, looking back on this title was a nice, relaxing place to stop at mid-week. A little fable-esque, a little social commentary, a little simple and charming illustration: The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a great read and chock-full of talking animals.

Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review:

Early in Sun-mi Hwang’s novel The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, the main character, a hen named Sprout, learns about sacrifice. After refusing to lay any more eggs for the farmer who owns her, she becomes “culled” and released from her chicken coop. However, she soon discovers that her new freedom comes with a loss of comforts such as shelter and food. To make matters worse, after she narrowly escapes from a menacing weasel in an open grave, the other farmyard animals, led by an arrogant rooster, reject her. “Culled?” he says. “Nobody wants you!”

Despite the harsh reality that Sprout has to face outside the coop, she doesn’t have to face it alone. While in the open grave, she meets Straggler, a mallard duck who also lives on the farm. Like Sprout, Straggler is a misfit, a wild duck among domesticated ones. He is allowed to stay on the farm, but he keeps his distance from the other ducks. Even though he isn’t able to convince the other animals to let Sprout stay on the farm, he is able to help her fulfill one wish: To sit on an egg and watch a baby hatch from it.

One day, while wandering the fields, she finds this egg and decides to sit on it until the mother returns. The mother never does, but when Straggler finds her, he agrees to stand guard while Sprout is brooding. The hen, of course, thinks this baby will be a chick. She also believes Straggler is under the mistaken impression that she laid the egg, but he really knows more about it than she realizes. In fact, before he meets a tragic end, he gives her advice on what to do with the hatchling.

For the rest of the review, go here.

But! There are awesome people who work at HMH—Drenka, Andrea Schultz, Sal Robinson, Ron Hogan, Jenna Johnson, others I’m sure I’m forgetting—and I just got their new catalog, which has way more international works that I ever would’ve expected. Granted, a lot of these are big-name, long-time HMH authors, but still, to lead off the catalog with two translations back-to-back is pretty bold for a press that’s also publishing Perfect One-Dish Dinners and Philip Roth’s new novel.

Maybe I’m just easily impressed, or maybe it’s because I’m (surprisingly) in a really cheery mood this morning, but, well, I just want to make up for (some) of the (occasionally) unfair criticisms I’ve lobbed at HMH.¹ Y’all are doing good work. And as a way of trying to make up for this, here’s a list of all of HMH’s forthcoming international works:

by Jose Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

In 1551, King Joao III of Portugal gave Archduke Maximilian an unusual wedding present: an elephant named Solomon. The elephant’s journey from Lisbon to Vienna was witnessed and remarked upon by scholars, historians, and ordinary people. Out of this material, José Saramago has spun a novel already heralded as “a triumph of language, imagination, and humor” (El País).

by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak.

A new book of poems by Wislawa Szymborska is a rare and exciting event. When Here was published in Poland, reviewers marveled, “How is it that she keeps getting better?” These twenty-seven poems, as rendered by prize-winning translators Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, are among her greatest ever. Whether writing about her teenage self, microscopic creatures, or the upsides to living on Earth, she remains a virtuoso of form, line, and thought.

by Gunter Grass, translated from the German by Krishna Winston.

(This is the book I’m most excited about.)

In an audacious literary experiment, Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory—they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass’s assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God?

by Carsten Jensen, translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund with Emma Ryder.

Carsten Jensen’s debut novel has taken the world by storm. Already hailed in Europe as an instant classic, We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, whose inhabitants have sailed the world’s oceans aboard freight ships for centuries. Spanning over a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, and from the barren rocks of Newfoundland to the lush plantations of Samoa, from the roughest bars in Tasmania, to the frozen coasts of northern Russia, We, the Drowned spins a magnificent tale of love, war, and adventure, a tale of the men who go to sea and the women they leave behind.

by Young-ha Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim.

Spanning the course of one day, Your Republic Is Calling You is an emotionally taut, psychologically astute, haunting novel that reveals the depth of one particularly gripping family secret and the way in which we sometimes never really know the people we love. Confronting moral questions on small and large scales, it mines the political and cultural transformations that have transformed South Korea since the 1980s. A lament for the fate of a certain kind of man and a certain kind of manhood, it is ultimately a searing study of the long and insidious effects of dividing a nation in two.

by Rana Dasgupta.

(Not a translation, but international in scope and background, and it sounds interesting. Although I have to say that I’m not entirely buying David Mitchell + Alexander Hemon, but if that’s accurate, well then, this must be awesome.)

With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Alexander Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams—and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.

¹ Apologies aside, your website still sucks.