Our Favorite International Reads of 2020 (and What We’ll Be Reading in 2021)
Editor
This year, I m keeping my recommendations to the Southern Cone, perhaps out of the wistful recollection that as we face gray, blustery afternoons here in New York, warmer climes hold elsewhere.
Daniel Tunnard s
Escapes(Unnamed Press), set in a world in which competitive Scrabble is a globally televised craze under the thumb of the Scrafia (yes, a Scrabble mafia), is an uproarious novel staked on the final encounter between former world champs Florence Satine and Buenaventura Escobar in Argentina s Tigre Delta. Told from the alternating viewpoints of Satine and Escobar as they seek to flee the Scrafia s long arm, this clever novel reads something like the imagined result had Piglia turned his attentions to competitive board games. Tunnard s book is a satisfying read that takes Alfred Mosher Butt s tame pastime and turns it into a brisk, riveting jaunt across languages, crime scenes, and
The Best Translated Books You Missed in 2020
As we approach the end of 2020, we’ve been speaking with translators, critics, publishers, writers, and booksellers about outstanding books in translation that readers might have missed this year. Read on for recommendations from Daniel Hahn, Maya Jaggi, Meng Jin, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Boyd Tonkin, and more.
Ulysses and
Mrs. Dalloway, this book, first published in Hindi in 1963, traces the experiences of a flaneur wandering through a city over the course of a single day, recording his experiences, memories, reflections, and emotional reactions to the world around him. The setting is the city of Jalandhar in 1930, an era of rapid change as India launched forward, fusing elements of its long, rich past with modern ideas and cultural elements to form a new, hybrid culture, amplified in all of its complexity by the country s dazzlingly complex multiethnic and multilingual nature.