Lily Meyer

AI may be the topic du jour, but for now only a human can read attentively and sensitively enough to genuinely recreate literature in a new language, as translators have done with these three works.

Iraqi poet Faleeha Hassan's memoir War and Me, Mexican novelist Brenda Lozano's Witches, and Uyghur novelist and social critic Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets have a few broad commonalities.

Mutt-Lon's The Blunder, Pina by Titaua Peu, and Thuận's Chinatown all come from different continents and deal, glancingly or in depth, with French colonialism.

Sometimes, it's not the author you choose, it's the translator. So we've picked three novels where the translation will help you discover new things about the text, even if you can read the original.

Jon McGregor's new novel follows an expedition guide who suffers a stroke in the middle of an Antarctic ice storm and loses the ability to speak — and the people around him at a loss for what to say.

Laurent Binet seems to genuinely want to know to what extent conquest and the cruelty it inevitably produces are reducible, redeemable, or escapable. He also plainly wants to play around.

In order to track Patrick Nathan's ideas, one must to get on board with his habit of invoking fascism broadly, emphasizing its aesthetic and imaginative tendencies over its concrete manifestations.

The third installment of British writer Deborah Levy's excellent Living Autobiography is largely a book about the collisions of fantasies and real life — or perhaps a synthesis of the two.

Though Susan Williams' book is framed far too expansively, it overflows with fascinating information, research and bold ideas — especially regarding Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

Everyone's talking about getting out and about now that the pandemic has calmed — but what if you don't want to? Here are three books in translation that'll help you dig into your own life and mind.