THE CULTURE OF LIES, last collection of essays I have of Dubravka Ugrešić's to review

THE CULTURE OF LIES
DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ (tr. Celia Hawkesworth)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešić's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life.

With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.

Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A collection of very wise, trenchant, and tendentious essays to cap off #WITMonth.

Shifting from Yugoslav nationality to Croatian was not a seamless process for Author Dubravka. A new passport under a new governing entity does not change the passport holder's identity or thought processes or, dangerously, political beliefs. Dissent is even more dangerous in a newly created state struggling to distance itself from the burdensome and ill-fitting imposed identity and ideology. Author Dubravka didn't fit in when Yugoslav was a political state's demonym, but neither did loads of other folk. "Croatian" as a political demonym is new enough that to dissent from the new ruling class is to risk losing the right to use it. This is where Author Dubravka ended up, an ethnic Croat instead of a Croatian citizen.

Labels don't matter much to me in my white US male's privilege. Unless I insist on bringing my Otherness to the fore, I can simply walk around being an "American," a label that makes me wince at its arrogance. Author Dubravka did not exist in that bubble of certainty. Her identity, dissenter, observer, critic, meant her labeling got complicated quickly in the upheavals of Communism's death throes. The wry tone of these works does not foreground a thing I perceive, possibly that I interpolate, the trauma and pain of losing an identity, a building block of selfhood. It's clear the fact of that loss is central to Author Dubravka's work; she does not wallow or lament but rather observes and analyzes. I still feel an edge of strong emotion despite it not being foregrounded.

I know of a writer colleague who claimed to a foreign journalist that he was ‘the victim of repression’ under Yugo-communism, that his books were banned, and that he had been in prison. That colleague was never in prison nor was he ‘the victim of repression’ and all his books were regularly published. I do not believe that he was lying. Exposed to media brainwashing, terror by forgetting and collective compulsion, my colleague had simply forgotten his personal history, he carried out an unconscious mental touching-up, and in the general context the spoken lie became an acceptable truth. And after all, the foreign journalist had come to hear just such a story, in his Westerner’s head he already carried such a stereotype: the story of a repressed writer in the former communist regime and a happy end in the new, democratic one.

It's not a shouted pain, it's a carefully phrased analysis of trauma's aftermath that shows how very painful it was for all to need to re-craft selves when their world ended. New nationalisms, new canons, new ethnic expressions glorified...all processes we undergo in youth and that are painful enough to live through even in that more mentally agile passage of life; as an older, even an old, person...!

I am no one. And everyone. In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian… Being an ethnic ‘bastard’ or ’schizophrenic’ is my natural choice, I even consider it a sign of mental and moral health. And I know that I am not alone. Violent, stubborn insistence on national identities has provoked a response: today many young citizens of former Yugoslavia, particularly those scattered throughout the world, stubbornly refuse any ethnic labels.

There is a lot to be learned for us in the US on the subject of nationalism and identity in 2026 that a public intellectual from a disintegrating polity can teach us from the 1990s. Author Dubravka felt, though, analyzed, contextualized for us already. I hope more of us will now absorb and appreciate that gift in our own parlous times.

HILDA HILST'S PAGE: #WITMonth DELIGHT THE OBSCENE MADAME D; pervy LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER

THE OBSCENE MADAME D
HILDA HILST (tr. Nathanaël, & Rachel Gontijo Araujo)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lispector

An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity...

The Obscene Madame D tells the story of Hillé, a sixty-year-old woman who has decided to abandon conventional life and spend the rest of her days in contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by the perplexity of her recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of metaphysical speculations that he considers delusional and vain.

In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that’s part James Joyce, part Clarice Lispector, and part de Sade, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction, as she searches for answers to great questions of life, death and the relationship between body and soul.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Wow. *fans self*

Horny, thy name is Hillé. No wonder poor ol' Ehud is (it would seem) grouchy about being dead and about Hillé's decision to take herself into seclusion and contemplate The Divine. Saint Teresa of Ávila got nothin' on her! Observant, intelligent, philosophical, self-reflective...all apply to both women. Such a waste for a pervy old ghost/revenant/remnant.

"You wear a mask, love , a livid and violent mask, to look at you is to penetrate into the vortex of nothingness, may your silence make itself mine and we’ll wander together in a lacunous vastitude, that’s why I speak, speak to exorcise you, that’s why I work with words, also to exorcize myself, that the bitterness of the abysses may cease, that may break in this tide of phonemes, of syllables, that a light may break, exempt of anguish it’s best to be quiet when your name is passion."

In under 100pp, Hillé does more to demonstrate the primacy of sensual awareness as a motivating factor in every mode of life than Freud's entire all-too-male œuvre. It is a work where the images, the words used in forming them, the events described by them, the colors smells sensations all evoke the kind of sexual awareness of the world that slots in with the saint's immanent experiences of her god.

I don't understand the body either, that caltrop, nor the bloody logic of days, nor the faces that stare me down in this village in which I live, nor what are a house, a concept, what legs are, what is coming and going, toward where and what, Ehud, what these old women are, the howls of childhood, these spent men, what do the fools think of themselves, the children, what is thinking, what is clarity, the sonorous, what is sound, a trill, a cry, a howl, what's a wing uhn?

What happens in these pages is alchemical, psychological simmering and then the transubstantiation of breakdown breaking fracturing into insight:

Dross, yes, the attempt to compose a speech without knowing anything of its beginning nor its end, nor why the necessity for this speech, why the necessity to try to situate oneself, which amounts to attempting to remain clutching a rope over the abyss and without even knowing how it is that one wound up there, nor whether one ought now to move to the right rather than the left, around the fog, bellow a roar, or above it? water? voices? ships? I am reconstituting sophisticated evenings, politics, duties, a sociology of future, a being here, they ask me, kindred with the world, and acting, and authors, citations, foaming verbosity, the ear hearing itself foremost but responding to the people with elegance propriety care as though in fact it had listened to people, theatre, all theatre

I know a lot of y'all don't like long quotes and/or don't see how the quotes I've selected are connected to my ideas in the review. I put them in less and less often because of that feedback.

Here is my last quote from this remarkable fever-dream of a story. It is a summation of life as lived inside a human body. It looks at the processes proceeding all unseen, invisible, hidden and covered up because they're ugly, because to be ugly is terrible and shameful and not to be shared:

Animals, say, why do we kill them? To eat. But eating is abominable, no? All that stuff going down the tube and later becoming mass and even later shit. Close your eyes and try to imagine your body inside. Wriggling, blood. Take the microscope. Ah, not me. What a thing, flesh, nails, hair, and such colors in there, purplish-red. Look at yourself. Where are you now? I'm looking at my stomach. It's horrible Ehud. And you? I'm looking at my lungs. They dilate, compress. Everything enters into me, everything goes out. There's nothing that only goes in? No. And God? God enters and goes out, Ehud? I don't know about that. The priest says that God is inside the heart. So, look at yours, see if it's there, inside. I'm lookin'. Is it? No. Let me listen to your heart. Lord, how it beats!

...and realize Ehud is not alive, a woman in psychological distress is sharing these gobbets of thought and powerfully phrasing the offal in her mind to address it to a man who was but is not.

A deeply, enfoldingly, humanely beautiful story of life and need and longing and love. Profound. Moving. So short it's one long sitting of a Sunday afternoon read. I've left Madame D and her Ehud a warmer, more accepting soul.

Also horny.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER
HILDA HILST (tr. John Keene)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy

This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous—not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet ‘pornographic’, but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist fragments worthy of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to letters that could have been penned by Enlightenment libertines like Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, the letters make up a polyphonic text that pushes the boundaries both of fiction and of decency.

The novel—a standalone masterpiece which originally appeared as part of a Brazilian tetralogy—changes form again partway through, when the indigent poet Stamatius finds Karl’s record of his erotic adventures in a trash can, and begins to write stories based on what he reads, and then to break down those stories into even briefer fragments. Karl’s letters inspire Stamatius’ writing, and their narratives and identities become ever more fragmented, until we begin to doubt whether they are truly separate people. What unites them is an abundantly lewd imagination and a fantastically creative relationship to the greatest seducer of all: language.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Straight-people sex *shudder* in astoundingly intense, deeply evocative flashes, fragments, and impressionistic sweeps of imagery. Lovely writing, the imagination behind these pieces is one that gets far, far too little attention in Anglophone readership.

It is going to offend prudes. It will genuinely repulse people who do not like the bodyness of sex. For the rest of us, it's aspirational; it proves the largest human sex organ is the brain. It is also the most important sex organ. The way these bits and moments work is in a frame that might make some unwilling to read the work at all: Karl, a rich, bored jerk writes to his sister about his bedroom gymnastics in detail. It kept me away from the read until, for #WITMonth, I had to become Stamatius...the starving artist whose sections of narrative are no less erotically charged but because he's impoverished it's okay (?...no more sense made here than Karl's wealth TBH), and he's, um, not quite so...he's free-form let's say.

Highly literary porn. It's the kind of "story" one associates with those old-timey one-handed reading letters from "real readers" magazines (do those still exist, or is the advent of streaming porn to blame for another cultural shift?) that kinda petered out when the writer'd uhh finished their thought.

No-plot all-vibes readers will love this little novella-length piece. Those who need an actual crafted narrative aren't really likely to enjoy it. And if reading about the juice and friction of the body in congress with others bothers you, click away, turn the corner, go wash something.

JULY 2026 IN REVIEW & August 2026 is #WITMonth

Amplifying voices: celebrating women in translation month | ProZ.com, via LinkedIn
JULY IN REVIEW

A month of wonders was had by all. Forty-one reviews written, fifty-three DRCs received; twenty-three of those reviewed in their publication month. That's 43%! Could not be happier with that. Of the remaining eighteen reviews, one was a five-star review of a 2020 novel from New Vessel Press: The Piano Student by Lea Singer, translated from German by Elisabeth Lauffer. I five-starred Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli, and all but five-starred Ada by Mark Haber; Unsayable: A Life in Writing by Michael Cunningham; The Sixth Nik by Pulitzer-winner Daniel Kraus; Event Horizon by [[Balsam Karam]]; and shockingly Grief Eater, lesbian zombie story by [[Emma Osborne]].

What a month! That's better than some years (notably 2018, only 65 reviews blogged the whole year)! While there were disappointments, they weren't Biblical disasters like The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse. *shudder*

On to August, with a high heart and a happy soul. Women in Translation Month is an August staple on my blog. Entries start in 2014. I'm always delighted to tell all y'all about this twelve-year tradition of shouting out the incredibly broad and wildly varied works by, about, and translated from every language and country I can think of, by women. Working in multiple languages to represent as accurately as possible the artistry of another person for the reading joy Anglophone readers is truly an act of the greatest generosity and highest cultural importance. Open Letter Books' site says, "Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014, and has since spawned numerous articles, events, and even the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation." And WomenInTranslation.org, the Mothership if you will, says it most authoritatively:
"WITMonth—aka Women in Translation Month—is an annual celebration of women writers from around the world, writing in languages other than English. Started by Meytal Radzinski in 2014, WITMonth has grown to become a staple of the online literary community, as well as a prominent presence in independent bookstores around the world. Every August, readers from all continents around the world (except Antarctica, but we’ll get those penguins yet!) gather in spirit (and sometimes in person) to read, review, and discuss works by women writers in translation. The idea is to spread the word about the Women in Translation project at large, and promote individual women writers in translation specifically. Follow #WITMonth on Twitter, Instagram, Booktube, and across the world!" I'm planning to write at least thirty-one full reviews of works translated by women this month. Even if they're translating men's writing. (I've been told before that this is "not in the spirit of the celebration" and I'm "diluting the intended impact of the hashtag," both of which snarky stupidities I have very consciously and intentionally ignored. This will not change.)

As an act of celebration I'm including a few special discounts I know publishers are offering on parts of their lists below with all the relevant details and the links to their sites. I'll add to these links as and when I come across more:

SEVEN STORIESThrough the end of August 2026, take 25% off all currently available translated books by women authors! Please note that all forthcoming books are available for preorder at 10% off. https://sevenstories.com/blogs/385-celebrate-women-in-translation-month-2026

TRANSIT BOOKS 30% off all titles by women in translation through the end of August with the discount code WITMONTH. https://www.transitbooks.org/postscript/women-in-translation-month

OPEN LETTER BOOKS 40% discount on all Open Letter print titles written by women, along with any book translated by a woman, for the whole month of August. Discount applied automatically at checkout. https://www.openletterbooks.org/collections/women-in-translation-month

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Use coupon code WITM at checkout to save 20% on your purchase. https://cup.columbia.edu/promotions/women-in-translation-month/women-in-translation-booklist/*
More, I hope, to come below:

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS Women in Translation Month celbration: 40% off all translations. Offer valid through September 15, use discount code 05FAIR26 at checkout. https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-subject/literature-in-translation/

WORLD EDITIONS offers a 40% discount on any orders (US, UK & Canada) of our WIT books. Please use code wit26 at checkout if you'd like to take advantage. https://worldeditions.org/home-4/books-written-translated-by-women/

JAGUARS' TOMB, a #WITMonth read whose time came

JAGUARS' TOMB
ANGÉLICA GORODISCHER (tr. Amalia Gladhart)
Vanderbilt University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jaguars' Tomb is a novel in three parts, written by three interconnected characters. Part one, "Hidden Variables" by María Celina Igarzábal, is narrated by Bruno Seguer. Seguer in turn is the author of the second part, "Recounting from Zero" ("Contar desde zero"), in which Evelynne Harrington, author of the third, is a central character. Harrington, finally, is the author of "Uncertainty" ("La incertidumbre"), whose protagonist is the dying Igarzábal. Each of the three parts revolves around the octagonal room that is alternately the jaguars' tomb, the central space of the torture center, and the heart of an abandoned house that hides an adulterous affair.

The novel, by Argentine author Angélica Gorodischer, is both an intriguing puzzle and a meditation on how to write about, or through, violence, injustice, and loss. Among Gorodischer's many novels, Jaguars' Tomb most directly addresses the abductions and disappearances that occurred under the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83. This is the fourth of Gorodischer's books translated into English. The first, Kalpa Imperial—translated by Ursula Le Guin—was selected for the New York Times summer reading list in 2003.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Y'all remember me talking up Kalpa Imperial, right? The link is above for refreshing of memories. This novel, made up of three novellas "by" three writer-characters, is like that collection of SFF stories in the sense that she is using the narrative form to make a bigger point that really means more than than it would if she just sat down and typed out the story.

Oh dear. That sounded like a rush to the exit.

The Dirty War against the Argentine military junta's enemies started almost fifty years ago...officially...but it won't really be over while there are survivors bearing scars. If you're wondering how long that will be...read A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children. These are nation-defining scars inflicted in the name of...what, greed? cruelty for its own sake?...these questions are the ones Author Gorodischer treats in these three novellas.

I think a lot of people, hearing that a novel is woven of shorter story-strands, aren't inclined to do more than nod absently that they've heard the description. Add another layer of artifice, fictional authors telling these fictional stories, and *click* out go the lights as brains head upstairs to bed.

Wake up now, drink some of Author Gorodischer's strong, bitter coffee, and think about what could cause so much pain that the story must be wrapped in a big layer cake of artifice in order to bring the impact down to bearable levels. That is the case with these intertwined tales of the horrors of life under a government that kidnaps, tortures, and kills its citizens who are guilty of nothing but disagreeing with the very government that is committing these horrible acts.

Layering, padding, defenses against the mere idea of direct head-on confrontation with the terrible subject...well, yeah, I think that would never be less than a helpful coping strategy. And as the layers are constructed they reveal what they were made to obscure. The very title of the novel is an uneasy nod to the avoided reality. There are many things this technique does well, eg making the empty space the center of the story's arc much as the absence of los desaparecidos is the center of those left behind's lives.

Like any technique, though, every benefit has a cost. Avoidance of difficult topics can end up with the literary equivalent of avoidant personality disorder. The bitterness of self-judgment, the harsh inner gaze that spotlights things not done, the Inquisition-level blaming of everyone especially the self for things not reasonably in their control, all so reasonably justified and so irrational on examination, all here. It's not an easy read though it's written in lovely prose. The depths of loss and rage...these are never easy topics to treat. It's greatly to Author Gorodischer's credit that she does not use her padding as a cop-out, a way of prettifying horrifying behavior.

It is inevitable that splitting the story into three narratives by three different people who are all writing about each other does not create deep investment in each character. While I can see this as a deliberate choice made to reinforce the central absence as painful, it also makes the read more effortful in the moment. I read this book to about the 33% mark during the Biden administration's extraordinary rendition kerfuffle (he'd publicly opposed it in 2007 but it continued as fact if not policy). It felt artificial, a stylistic tic to me then.

Come January 2025 and Kilmar Abrego García's travails, the idea seemed much more immediate, indeed urgent, to grapple with. I found myself unwilling to confront the horrors head-on, needing some space between myself and the topic's hyperreality.

Rather makes Author Gorodischer's case for her technical choice for her.

I'm hoping this desire to see what the behaviors we are tacitly, by silence, condoning today cost an earlier generation of a society that did then what we are doing now cost them in psychic suffering.

AUGUST WAS #WITMONTH...NOW IT'S SEPTEMBER, NATIONAL TRANSLATION MONTH

AUGUST 2025 was a very satisfying #WITMonth! My goal was writing at least 30 reviews of works translated by, or written by and then translated, from women the world around sourced from the DRC aggregators.

End of celebration report: thirty-two (32) posted, two ahead of my goal. As is always true, searching the tag "#WITMonth" on the blog, by clicking it at the bottom of this entry or by entering the text in the search box, will give you all the entries so tagged. You can also click right here.

There were standout reads, of course; fewer than I would've preferred, but including a strong contender for my 2025 six-stars-of-five accolade is The Remembered Soldier, a Dutch Great-War story of identity, of need and longing and love you can't imagine life without, all so precisely, sharply even, wrapped in that wooliest of media: Memory. There is nothing in any of that warbling of joy to detract from the amazing non-fiction work (So What) If I'm a Puta that tells the own-voices stories of transfem sex workers in Brazil. Transfem folk are at the highest risk imaginable for femicide. It's a tough, bleak read, but it left me fully aware of how easy it is for transphobic...people...to do their ugly, hateful work without knowing a fraction of the cost others must pay for it.

I'm delighted that August is going out on the happy note of a lovely stretch of just-right days with sun, breeze, not-hot not-cold temperatures, not-too-humid (I live on the beach, humid gonna happen) air. It's like it was before climate change really began biting us.

So, September is #NationalTranslationMonth, which I'll be leaning into for my reviewing. I'll include women's translations as new ones pop up, hashtagging with both #NationalTranslationMonth and #WITMonth to be sure they're discoverable from every abgle. It won't be as focused a push, but will definitely be noticeable. No goals set so I'm not pressuring myself to accomplish something; I'll just be taking extra note of a book's origins.

And with that, I'll wish global-northerners a happy incoming fall and global-southerners the same for spring! Excellent reading mojo for all, of course.

VIVIAN, #WITMonth biographical novel illuminating a complex woman from many angles

VIVIAN
CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT (tr. Paul Russell Garrett)
Fitzcarraldo Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In her new novel, Christina Hesselholdt delves into the world of the enigmatic American photographer, Vivian Maier (1926-2009), whose unique photographic body of work only reached the public by chance.

On the surface, Vivian Maier lived a quiet life as a loving, firm and feisty nanny for wealthy families in Chicago and New York. But throughout four decades, she took more than 150,000 photos, mainly with Rolleiflex cameras. The pictures were only discovered in an auction shortly before she died, impoverished and feasibly very lonely. In a time when self-obsession and representation are at an all-time high, Vivian Maier holds a particular fascination. Who was this eccentric person? And why did she not try to make a living from her art?

In VIVIAN, a chorus of voices, including Vivian's own, address these questions. We watch Vivian grow up in a severely dysfunctional family in New York and Champsaur in France, and we follow her as a nanny in Chicago and as a photographer on the streets of these American cities and in rural France. The novel comprises multiple voices: Vivian's, her mother's, one of the children she looked after and her parents. And crucially, the voice of the inquisitive narrator, who pulls the threads together and asks Vivian prying questions.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There's a chorus in this book, all right, one that talks around Vivian Maier's life...because there are so few real reliable sources on the life of this odd, fragmented woman...because the film about her already plowed the factual field of her life...because she was a pretty ordinary person as well as an extraordinary observer.

All of which adds up to a life that doesn't have enough factual meat but has very interesting story-bones to carry a text treatment that adds to the excellent films that center her wonderful visual legacy. A polyphonic novel can stitch together points of view that can't bear non-fiction's scrutiny while making truthful points about how Vivian became the figure, the outsider icon, the feminist parable that she was so perfectly suited to become.

A woman doing childcare as a career while creating hundreds of thousands of photographs, many iconic now they're public, is proof of women's clear statements that The System&8480; is set up to ignore women's creativity. Her life wasn't just odd, though, because she was brought up oddly; I think her personality as it comes through literally everywhere she is discussed is that of an outsider. It makes one a better observer to feel and to be perpetually outside the herd, away from the hearth, looking in at it with removed detached clarity.

This novel, from structure to execution on a sentence level, reinforces that sense. As I read the story, I realized how much it added to my appreciation of Author Hesselholdt's presentation of Vivian to realize that she researched her subject in a foreign language source pool; wrote her story in Danish (to wide praise); and then I read it in English translation.

It is perfection as an origin story; it has some concomitant infelicities on the gestalt. The multiple PoV structure gets wearing because it demands one exercise memory to connect what that character said quite a reading-while ago. It also, while illuminating Vivian in the light she blocked for different people, makes me wish for fewer shifts and a shorter book. At under two hundred pages, I was sure I'd knock out the read in a day and a half; it took over five years because he aforementioned required concentration wasn't always available for me to give leading to five separate re-starts.

While I ended up a true aficionado of the story I was there because I'm really stubborn. Others might not feel like putting in the effort of resolving polyphony into its complex harmony, in focusing the varying wavelengths of light into a very slightly blurry image. I'd recommend you do, but I know it's a style that won't suit all. If possible read the ebook sample available to check how you vibe with the style.

Authors who take unusual approaches to storytelling are to be praised; it's down to your unique taste if they're to be supported. I'm praising, are you supporting?

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DASSOUKINE'S TROUSERS, Moroccan author's Anglophone debut from 2016

THE CURIOUS CASE OF DASSOUKINE'S TROUSERS
FOUAD LAROUI (tr. Emma Ramadan; intro. Laila Lalami)
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning English-language debut by Morocco's most prominent contemporary author, a linked story collection exploring what it means to be foreign.

Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"

One of Literary Hub's Books to Read this May

One of Asbury Park Press Books to Read this Summer
This long-awaited English-language debut from Morocco's most prominent contemporary writer won the Prix Gouncourt de Nouvelles, France's most prestigious literary award, for best story collection. Laroui uses surrealism, laugh-out-loud humor, and profound compassion across a variety of literary styles to highlight the absurdity of the human condition, exploring the realities of life in a world where everything is foreign.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Funny, farcical, sometimes surreal...or do I just lack context to get the concrete reality of what he's saying...we have Laila Lalami to thank for this collection's appearance in English nine years ago. She set out to interest US publishers in a different book entirely, On Islamism: A Personal Refutation of Religious Fundamentalism, which is still untranslated into English (though available in Dutch and, of course, French) and which I myownself would devour whole, but this collection won the nod of premiering Laroui's quirky worldview to us. Deep Vellum does this work from multiple languages into US English and, every #WITMonth, takes a strong lead on books reviewed here.

The tone of this collection is deadpan. Much of the humor, culturally bound, in it requires a moment's thought to "get" but is never crudely or condescendingly signposted by either the author or translator Emma Ramadan. I find this refreshing; I am happy to make an effort to understand what I'm reading, and I'm aware people who read my reviews are, too. There is a lot of surface fun, and a lot of surreal oddness, to enjoy in the stories. It's a collection that tells us, no matter where we are in space and time, others in other spaces and times were and are just as perplexed, bemused, and wryly amused as we are.

Comme d'habitude, these nine stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.

The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers has fun with the fish-out-of-water trope, telling it in slightly Kafkaesque twists as a self-important fool has truly weird things...your trousers ever just disappear on you?...then even stranger responses to his predicament that are wildly disproportionate. Skewers every archetype of The Establishment. As the fool narrates his story to "us" (the invisible audience stand-in) he grows more and more agitated, and I grew louder and louder in my cackles and snorts. 4.5*

Dislocation does what it says on the tin...dislocates you. The question, repeated with variations. "What would it be like, he asked himself, a world where everything is foreign?" and we are off into an entire field of rabbit holes leading into misuderstandings, double entendres, miscommunications. What does Maati's "sweet, kind Anna" mean when she says he's "Moroccan by birth, in body, but "French in the head"? What levels of displacement, belonging without being accepted, are there in "sweet, kind Anna" (who isn't) "laughed in his face {when} even he wasn't very convinced by his pro domo plea." (An argument made in support of one's existing case.) Deeper and deeper, Anna the touchstone, the source of all the emotion (mostly anger) as the narrator, I kept thinking of him as the interlocutor, the straight man, feeding me thoughts I found funny-hmmm and funny-haha in differing proportions the deeper we got into Utrecht where he seeks asylum and has married "sweet, kind Anna" as "{t}his one went forth in quest of truth as a hero, and at last got for himself a small, decked-up lie: his marriage he calleth it."

He decides, stunned, what these twists and turns and gyrations mean. You get the same privilege. I was swept into the slipstream and liked where I went. 4*

Born Nowhere is hung on the story-nail in the wall of Melpomene's study holding up the tragedy's summation: "After all, I know who I am, right?"

That remains to be seen, Moroccan in Paris, trying to evade repression oppression and impression: "This story proves what I have always believed. Identity problems don't exist. We create them! 'Who am I? Where am I going? What am I good for?'" He's in for an ugly surprise, like so many in this ever-more-tightly surveilled world of 2025. 3.5* for its sketchiness, incompleteness of narrative

Kuourigba, or the Laws of the Universe allows us to eavesdrop on the coffee-house chat of several young men, one a stringer for La Tribune de Casablanca with a tale of Kuourigba to tell. A general strike, a blow against global capitalism, and the forces of reaction writ small, local, petty in the French sense. Much palaver there in the Café de le Univers, in the shaggy-dog story way of young men solving problems they're a ways off from understanding. 3*

What's Not Said in Brussels is just not sayable. How does a couple survive long-distance (a question I'm intimately enmeshed in now) and survive language mismatches and cultural cross-purposes too? Annie (who doesn't get his jokes) and John (who "mansplains" everything) arrange to meet in Brussels with the intent of breaking up, though neither has said that to the other yet. A cloud of seemingly random bits and patches of thought and memory obtrude, intrude, exude a mist of influence over each of them.

Never decide things in the silence of your head when they need to be enacted in the clamor of life as we humans live it. It's pointless and it causes a lot of wasted anxiety. 4*

Bennani's Bodyguard poor Nagib, those autoimmune diseases might've been preferable.

Another Café romp through what language does when friends, close enemies that they are, become, and embody for each other, are in full cry as they pursue storycraft to the detriment, or the exaltation in reverse, of mere logic. 4.5*

The Invention of Dry Swimming is so surreal, so funny within that range of unreality, and so impossible to convey in summary that I'm offering only this: "If this story does not make you laugh in startled awareness of these thoughts being expressed, seek medical assistance for your probable ischemic event." 4.5*

Fifteen Minutes as Philosophers feels the most like it was written by a French intellectual (it was) and aimed at other French intellectuals (I ain't). I can't decide if this is intended to cause embarrassment or amusement. It left me unmoved. The only one in the entire collection I did not fully enjoy, it was still very intriguing because I was uncertain of the effect on me that was intended. 3*

The Night Before Revolution! War! Action at last! Overthrowing the Oppressor!

...and then what...? 4*

TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen, biography of a recovered queer elder

TOO GOOD TO GET MARRIED: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen
BONNIE YOCHELSON (foreword by Victoria Munro & Jessica B Phillips)
Empire State Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$39.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more

Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.

When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by pursuing athletics, higher education, or careers. She had romantic affairs with women, and at 31, she met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Briefly, Austen considered becoming a professional photographer. She illustrated Bicycling for Ladies, a guide written by her friend Violet Ward, and she explored the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan to produce a portfolio, “Street Types of New York.” Rejecting the taint of commerce, however, she remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side.

Although interest in Austen has accelerated since 2017, when the Alice Austen House was designated a national site of LGBTQ history, the only prior book on Austen was published in 1976. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer. Through analysis of Austen’s photographs, Yochelson illuminates the history of American photography and the history of sexuality.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This isn't an obvious fit for the usual definition of #WITMonth I've been working with. Indulge me for a moment: In society, now as much as in Austen's time, there is a phenomenon called "code switching." It's a kind of translation your queer friends know well, and your young friends, your opposite-gender friend;, we are most all of us doing a bit of code-switching.

What Author Yochelson does in this magisterial biography of lesbian artist and bon vivant is a translation of Austen's code-switching between woman of substance and closeted (as all were then required to be)...if only barely...lesbian in a long-term partnership.

It occurred to me to call this a translation when I read more about how Austen "{rejected} the taint of commerce...{and} remained within the confines of elite society with Tate by her side." This was a woman who spoke one language, of intimacy and sapphic love, at home, and a very, very different one among her public social circle. Austen documented, and Author Yochelson caringly and carefully examines, the world of women we would otherwise never know existed.

What this book does with skill and panache is the very thing the presently installed in government social reactionaries hate the most: Demonstrate in words and pictures that queerness, its existence and its joyfulness, has always existed and thus is among the real identities others can ascribe to.

There is more shock in the world of today at these intimate, fun-having images than there was in the earlier Gilded Age, because the sexual lives of others are more publicly known and thus easier to discuss...and judge...than the private lives of the day. Gossip was then shameful, vulgar, low; and is now journalism, casually reported and widely and openly discussed. Reality TV and celebrity journalism are thoroughly established in respectability.

It is a world I suspect Miss Austen would thoroughly dislike.

This house, this family, is Miss Austen's native world. Gossip about personal lives, while surely (humanly) indulged in, would not be done in public by these folk. Officially. Behind hands and doors and fans, sure! Thus the need to code-switch constantly would've kept Miss Austen and later Miss Tate (her partner) as well quite busy and alert.

The ladies in question in later life

The value of this explication of life among the hidden sapphic sisters of the era can't be overstated. Aesthetically we're all much richer for the re-emergence of these images; societally, we are hugely enriched by this evidence of the way diversity has flourished and enriched the culture of every era.

Look carefully, these were shocking, as tame as they seem now!

I think this work of translation from lives once unable to be spoken openly to the mass medium of publishing, as a rescue operation of identity and artistry previously masked and ignored, is worth the purchase price. There are over 100 photographs in the text. It is a treasure trove of lesbian life in the first Gilded Age. It is also a human life's worth of creative joy and pleasure shared.

It is, most importantly in my eyes, my elder sibling in queerness restored to me, guiding me through the world's rage and hate by her example. Celebrate that beauty and gift.

EMPTY CAGES, latest read from Hoopoe Books for #WITMonth

EMPTY CAGES
FATMA QANDIL
Hoopoe Books|American University in Cairo Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, Empty Cages is an urgent and raw confessional of memory and family and all that is lost and won in one woman's lifetime

The discovery of an old tin of chocolates, its contents long ago devoured, marks the entry into this intimate story that reaches back through a lifetime of memories in search of self and home.

In celebration and suffering, triumph and disappointment, Qandil’s voice is unflinching, revealing both a determination to speak the truth and a poetic sensitivity that is disarming. Reflecting on a family disintegrating—and with it, perhaps, a whole way of life—memories of a happy childhood melt away to reveal the fecklessness of selfish older brothers, a father’s addiction, a mother’s illness, and the violence and death—both literal and figurative—of those nearby.

Recipient of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, this stunning fictional debut marks the arrival of a stunning new voice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Lyrically examining disappointment as a goad to seek one's own path is not an ordinary novelistic choice. Author Qandil chooses that course in this story of Fatma designing a life that suits her, that agrees with her, and that excludes the always unpleasant reality of family failures and failings. Quite radical for a woman in Egypt...or anywhere for that matter...to choose.

I can see the reasons Author Qandil was awarded a literary prize, and it is meet and right that she should receive one named for Nahfouz. Adam Talib has rendered her prose into fluid, mellifluous English, so I can feel the richness and harmony of her native language underpinning the translation. The story commences with meditations on a Cadbury's chocolates tin, and for several pages we follow Fatma's thoughts and memories as they swirl and coruscate to form a story out of what I'd see as trash.

When poets write prose it can be a beautiful gift. Poet and novelist Qandil's story exemplifies this in her (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) autobiographical novel. I was never sure, nor do I feel I was expected to be, how much Fatma was Everywoman, and how much was generalized from the unending fight against the plight of women in a patriarchal world.

That plight is exemplified by novel-Fatma's cultural expectation of her advantageous (to the men in her family) marriage. She bears much cultural weight in coping alone (dead mother, only girl) with her addict father and her unbearably narcissistic brothers. Marriage she flatly rejects. Takes bold, brassy confidence to do that, and succeed...yet never trigger a violent backlash in a world around her that is steeped in misogynistic violence.

Mostly.

Whenever you read a passage and think, "oh, that means this," don't get too invested in that interpretation. Author Qandil does not traffic in certainty or security or any other absolutes. Her story is smoke, water, sunlight...smooth to look at, seeming solid from this way or that of examining it, but grasp it and end up with something you did not expect left in your hands.

That, my friends, is how you know you're seeing Art being made before your dazzled gaze.

Why not five stars? Some details are culture-specific enough as to require explication that does not happen. I think none are holes that make the story unrelatable, just smaller moments that add nothing in English but feel like they did originally. If they did not, then the docked half-star stays the same.

(SO WHAT) IF I'M A PUTA: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire, starting #WITMonth with a, umm, bang

(SO WHAT) IF I'M A PUTA: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire
AMARA MOIRA (edited and tr. Amanda De Lisio & tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An incisive, intimate diary of the life of a travesti sex worker in Brazil, with a foreword by Charlotte Shane

So What If I’m a Puta, originally published on author Amara Moira’s popular blog of the same name, consists of 44 crônicas that wryly portray her experiences as a trans sex worker in Brazil. In a brazen, funny, and at times heartbreaking voice, Moira explores the political and personal textures of her encounters with the men who buy sex from her, and the complex reality of her labor of a sort of love.

Woven through Moira’s essays are reflections on transition, safe sex, desire, whorephobia, consent—in the grim context of Brazil’s record rates of violence against trans women. Ultimately, Moira writes to center trans sex workers in Brazil’s putafeminist movement, modeling a feminism that envisions inclusivity, safety, self-determination, and joy for us all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Self-determination, personal autonomy, individual freedom, call it what you like: It is the central fact in the competing ideologies of high-control and laissez-faire systems of social organization duking it out around the world of 2025. Spoiler alert: It's always going to fall short for one side's happiness and comfort. I myownself want it fall shortest for the high-control (usually religious) fascist slime.

There. I'm out of the closet. I want what "They" claim to want, the PTB out of my personal business, telling me who I can fuck, marry, or vote for. What "They" want is to impose more control on people they don't like, eg women, queers, other religions, and that will make "Them" happy. No it won't. Read Amara's words.

Her clients for sex services are very high-control men, from (I suspect) the same background as the other fascists though that is only inference on my part. The stories of the services they require of Amara, a woman in their eyes, aren't any surprise to any woman reading the book.As a cisqueer man i'm not going to assume I get what these cishet men are after because I'm not after it. I'll say that every single woman I've ever known well enough to have this kind of subject arise in our conversations has a story like at least one of Amara's stories...men who get joy(?) from overriding her wishes, aka rape, all the weird psychosexual kinks all people have...it's part of her job as a puta (whore in English) to meet them. Or so the men buying access to her body assume.

The huge tragedy in this is transphobia. It leaves women like Amara outside the moral indignation circle "feminists" like the hateful wizard-book lady draw to protect women from abuse and exploitation. It leaves these women open to the rage-filled hate of their clients, often leading to femicide, that evil act of gendered violence.

Those gender essentialists are complicit in each and every crime committed against transfem or transmasc people. If you are a gender essentialist, do not tell me so and expect to receive any respect or even tolerance for your hateful belief.

Amara Moira's blog, this epitome of it brought into English by the amazing Bruna Dantas Lobato (whose work I've praised in those linked reviews) and Amanda De Lisio (who both edited the blog entries and assisted in translation), takes back control of her narrative. She is the embodiment of self-determination, lacking throughout this read even a whiff of victimhood. And honestly, if Author Amara wanted to play the victim card, I would say nothing against it. She has too much integrity for suchlike nonsense, though.

The only quibble I have is the same one I have with all fix-ups of shorter works: It gets repetitive. The book clocks in at under 200pp, so it isn't a deal-breaker for me. I do not know how better to convey my sense of the importance of this read than to say: If ever you're going to say a transphobic word, don't open your yap until you've gotten to know a trans person.

Start here.

AUGUST 2025 is #WITMonth again!

Boydell & Brewer's beautiful 2019 banner
Women In Translation Month (#WITMonth) is a long-running project, since 2013, now observed in the US in August. It's meant to address a lack of attention (readership follows attention) to women writing in, or translating from, languages not English. "The project also promotes works by underrepresented trans and nonbinary writers, unless they otherwise ask not to be included in the gendered project," per their FAQ, so I feel more comfortable supporting their laudable aims.

I seek out women's writing all year round. I'm trying to promote translated literature as a delight to read, a fascinating extra layer of peeking into a non-US culture's storytelling, by using the hashtag #WITMonth year-round to make it easy for those seeking out translations at any time. There's also #NationalTranslationMonth in September for the US reader not committed to gender politics. I'm a bit more lax about hashtagging that one.

I don't set numerical goals very often, they feel performative for me because I read so very much...old, disabled, not much into TV, and hooked into the DRC ecosystem means I've got enough reading material to last until I'm dead...twice over. For 2025's #WITMonth, I'll state as my goal to publish a review of a title at least once a day six days a week. Five full weeks in August this year means at least thirty reviews.

Since July 2025 was a sixty-two review month, barring a horrible unknown thing preventing me, I ought to get there with room to spare. I encourage everyone who visits my blog to join me to whatever level is attainable to you.

LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR, #WITMonth Japanese YA fantasy page-turner

LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR
MIZUKI TSUJIMURA (tr. Philip Gabriel)
Erewhon Books
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a tranquil neighborhood of Tokyo seven students are avoiding going to school—hiding in their darkened bedrooms, unable to face their family and friends—until the moment they find the mirrors in their bedrooms are shining.

At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives into to a wondrous castle straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale. This whimsical place, oddly lacking in food and running water but full of electrical sockets, is home to a petulant girl in a mask, named Wolf Queen and becomes their playground and refuge during school hours. Hidden within the walls they’re told is a key that will grant one wish, and a set of clues with which to find it. But there's a catch: the key must be found by the end of the school year and they must leave the premises by five o'clock each day or else suffer a fatal end.

As time passes, a devastating truth emerges: only those brave enough to share their stories will be saved. And so they begin to unlock each other's stories: how a boy is showered with more gadgets than love; how another suffers a painful and unexplained rejection and how a girl lives in fear of her predatory stepfather. As they struggle to abide by the rules of the game, a moving story unfolds, of seven characters trapped in a cycle of misunderstanding and loneliness, who are ultimately set free by the power of friendship, empathy, and sacrifice.

Exploring vivid human stories with a twisty and puzzle-like plot, this heart-warming novel is full of joy and hope for anyone touched by sadness and vulnerability. At the heart of this tender, playful tale is a powerful message about the importance of reaching out which shows how with one kind act you can change your life for the better, and more importantly, you can change the lives of others.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A story about coming out, though not the kind that phrase currently evokes. These socially maladroit and thus ostracized middle-schoolers are magically transported away from the bullying horrors of that age...the characterization of reincarnation as an endless round of middle-school lifetimes makes me so very glad I'm not A Believer...but, of course, there's a price to pay for this act of rescue. The seven of them must open up, honestly share their experiences, and only then will they be truly safe.

Well. That sounds like something I'd be sharpening my flensing knife with a ghoulish grin on my face, doesn't it? More adolescent exceptionalism! And with an added splodge of fantasy goo! "Oh he's gonna go to town on this one!"

Not this time.

Any story in which adolescent readers are encouraged, without bludgeoning, to share, and to respect the gift of sharing from another, gets my vote. Then to put it in a fantasy world that protects the wounded ones? Bonus points! To go on with the worldbuilding in a way that connects their safe escape spot back to the world they're rescued from, yet without the toxicity they need rescuing from flooding in after them? Rare and delicate flower, let me inhale you! The most usual problems are here, the bullying and the losses of safety and love. Each person's also shown to be made aware from the response to the issue that led the sufferer to this magical safe space of how much different the same stimulus can feel to different people.

Literally the point of this entire book is to learn the art of perspective in dealings with others.

I would like to experience no surprise, no extra frisson of happiness at this. The world would be a better place if I didn't. But I did, and I encourage all y'all with grands, niblings, kids of twelve or more, to grab this story up thence to present it ever-so-casually to them. It's a message, one of kindness and the presumption of goodwill on the part of all who are not genuinely rotten-souled, that I'd strongly urge getting into their heads.

Their dads and uncles, older brothers, and so on, as well.

August 2024's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews #WITMonth

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil (tr. Nermin Menemencioğlu & Amy Marie Spangler)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In English at last: the first novel by the first Turkish woman to ever be nominated for the Nobel. A Strange Woman is the story of Nermin, a young woman and aspiring poet growing up in Istanbul. Nermin frequents coffeehouses and underground readings, determined to immerse herself in the creative, anarchist youth culture of Turkey’s capital; however, she is regularly thwarted by her complicated relationship to her parents, members of the old guard who are wary of Nermin’s turn toward secularism.

In four parts, A Strange Woman narrates the past and present of a Turkish family through the viewpoints of the main characters involved. This rebellious, avant-garde novel tackles sexuality, the unconscious, and psychoanalysis, all through the lens of modernizing 20th-century Turkey. Deep Vellum brings this long-awaited translation of the debut novel by a trailblazing feminist voice to US readers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "At last" indeed! This fifty-three-year-old tale is, I suppose, a feminist classic in Turkey...if it's still available there, considering how horrifically the current fascist government has wrenched Turkey to the political wrong that we call "the right" in English. Imagine! The horror of a young woman seeking new ideas, and even *gasp* s-e-x!!

The problem is its an oft-told tale of a woman declaring independence from a rigid, repressive, patriarchal culture. Not fresh,or new, or even very interesting. It's a damned good idea to get it into the hands of 2024's young US women to motivate them to vote against this country's version of the Turkish regime. This view into the struggles of the past could blast 'em awake. I'm already there, been there a while, so found this not very exciting.

Deep Vellum wants $16.95, but Amazon only wants $10.79 for the trade paper edition at the non-affiliate link.

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The Performance by Claudia Petrucci (tr. Anne Milano Appel)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of a love triangle played out through mutual manipulation

Giorgia was a talented actress before she abandoned her stage career and fell in love with Filippo. She settles into a life of quiet compromise—until one day she bumps into her old theater director, Mauro, who fans the acting flame back to life. But setting a restless soul on fire can be dangerous if she loses sight of the boundary between reality and fiction—and Giorgia collapses, ending up in a clinic. Filippo and Mauro find themselves both accomplices and adversaries, seduced by a dangerous game to heal and win back Giorgia: by writing the script for her perfect life. In this dazzling debut, Petrucci explores the ambiguous borders between love, possession, and control in clear, magnetic prose.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The prose is great! I felt unable to tear myself away. I badly wanted to, because this is a super-squick story of two men conspiring to gaslight a woman who fell apart because she put men and their demands on her before her duty of self-care. This story always bewilders me...why would you do that?

Still more confusingly, the gaslighting is positive, intended to give her back a constructive, capable sense of herself. But it's coming from the men. They're *saving* her.

Not a story I want to amplify.

World Editions wants $18.99 for any edition, Amazon wants $14.99 at the non-affiliate link. A bargain for the prose; the story...you decide.

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It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo (tr. Elizabeth Bryer)

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Told with gripping intensity, It Would be Night in Caracas chronicles one woman’s desperate battle to survive amid the dangerous, sometimes deadly, turbulence of modern Venezuela and the lengths she must go to secure her future.

In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcon stands over an open grave. Alone, except for harried undertakers, she buries her mother–the only family Adelaida has ever known.

Numb with grief, Adelaida returns to the apartment they shared. Outside the window that she tapes shut every night—to prevent the tear gas raining down on protesters in the streets from seeping in. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida resists and is beaten up. It is the beginning of a fight for survival in a country that has disintegrated into violence and anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But as fate would have it, Adelaida is given a gruesome choice that could secure her escape.

Filled with riveting twists and turns, and told in a powerful, urgent voice, It Would Be Night in Caracas is a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA AMAZON FIRST READS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Too much going on, ends up dissipating all my genuine and interested involvement in this story of a woman living an ordinary life in extraordinary times in a collapsing democracy. No sooner does the mother get buried than five other things happen in ten minutes. Exaggerating for effect, of course.

It's not that I DISliked the read. It's that I couldn't keep up with it.

HarperVia asks you for $2.99 to read a Kindle edition at the non-affiliate link. I would not feel irked had I spent that on this read.

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A Winter's Promise: The Mirror Visitor Book 1 by Christelle Dabos (tr. Hildegarde Serle)

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Long ago, following a cataclysm called “The Rupture,” the world was shattered into many floating celestial islands. Known now as Arks, each has developed in distinct ways; each seems to possess its own unique relationship to time, such that nowadays vastly different worlds exist, together but apart. And over all of the Arks the spirit of an omnipotent ancestor abides.

Ophelia lives on Anima, an ark where objects have souls. Beneath her worn scarf and thick glasses, the young girl hides the ability to read and communicate with the souls of objects, and the power to travel through mirrors. Her peaceful existence on the Ark of Anima is disrupted when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, from the powerful Dragon clan. Ophelia must leave her family and follow her fiancée to the floating capital on the distant Ark of the Pole. Why has she been chosen? Why must she hide her true identity? Though she doesn’t know it yet, she has become a pawn in a deadly plot.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA AMAZON FIRST READS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Adolescent exceptionalism gets validated hard in this fun first-in-series fantasy. There are four in total, or so far at least.

I am deeply uninterested in how Unique and Special and Girl this character is. I enjoyed the animate-world parts, and found the worldbuilding deft. It was allowed to be part of the story not presented as A Revelation. As she moves through the steps of discovering *what* is happening, she also learns the whys of it.

Not at all a bad read...especially for someone who doesn't have decades and decades of possessing a "Y" chromosome. In fact, best for people who would say men are possessed by their "Y" chromosome.

Europa Editions offers a Kindlebook for $7.59 at the non-affiliate link. Ouch.

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The Last Twist of the Knife (Brazilian Literature) by João Almino (tr. Elizabeth Lowe)

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Publisher Says: After a quarrel, an ageing lawyer leaves his wife and travels from Brasília to the dry, lawless backlands of Brazil’s northeastern plateau, where he grew up. He has vague plans to start a new life, to buy a ranch and farm cotton, but unresolved childhood obsessions, fantasies, traumas resurface, threatening to overwhelm his very sense of identity. Consumed with thoughts of revenge against the man who murdered his father when he was only two, he discovers that he may in fact have been the lovechild of his rich godfather―the man who ordered the hit―and may therefore be the half-brother of the girl for whom he harbored an adolescent sexual fixation.

In this masterful novel rich in local color, João Almino creates a complex, damaged narrator inexorably dragged down into the vortex of his own treacherous memories.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Bored middle-aged man obsesses over The Girl That Got Away. After divorcing the wife who has the temerity not to save him from himself, he moves home to The Provinces *eyeroll* from the city, can't find the One, discovers he's descended from a long line of serial sexual predators/abusers, and...well, that's it, really.

Even if this was about him pining for a boy from his past, I'd find this a bog-standard iteration of a story I'm not very fond of anyway.

Dalkey Archive asks for $9.95 to jet you read a Kindle edition at the non-affiliate link. It has the virtue of being short.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (50%) by Lucy Sante

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape.

Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was.

Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities.

I HAVE OWNED THIS BOOK FOR DECADES.

My Review: Yeah, this is a re-read; this is also a five-star Pearl-Rule read. It's here because Author Sante is now Lucy, not Luc. I wanted to re-read it with Lucy's transition in my mind, as a test of my hypothesis that the transition was not some giant, wrenching shift in the author's identity.

Job done. Halfway through Part Three, the law'n'order bit that I always get boiling mad reading, I figured out that Lucy, as a person new to my conscious awareness, changed nothing in my idea of Author Sante as a prose stylist or a storyteller. I immersed myself into Author Sante's deep dive into my beloved home city without any slightest thought of how the story would be different had it been written by Lucy, not Luc...they're both Author Sante, albeit I'm sure age has wrought its usual changes on the idea factory within. That would be true no matter whose writing one is looking at.

Why transphobes think transitioning ruins anything at all says bad things about them, and only them.

FSG asks $12.99 for a Kindle version. This is a must-read for all Manhattanphiles, anyone interested in the evolution of cities, and any aspiring hipsters.

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The Book of Elsewhere (BRZRKR) by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville (25%)

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: The legendary Keanu Reeves and inimitable writer China Miéville team up on this genre-bending epic of ancient powers, modern war, and an outcast who cannot die.

A mind-blowing epic from Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, unlike anything these two genre-bending pioneers have created before, inspired by the world of the BRZRKR comic books

She said, We needed a tool. So I asked the gods.

There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.”

And he wants to be able to die.

In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own.

In a collaboration that combines Miéville’s singular style and creativity with Reeves’s haunting and soul-stirring narrative, these two inimitable artists have created something utterly unique, sure to delight existing fans and to create scores of new ones.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Bitter dregs of disappointment.

I need to stay much more in the head of "no comic books" and I'll be happier, and make better reading choices for myself. This kind of pseudoprofound character, like The Ancient Mariner, or the Highlander, whose wisdom is aperçus strung together on worn-out fibers of fraying plot-ropes unbundled to make them stretch farther, just does not work for me.

Del Rey Books wants $14.99 for an ebook. Not my $15, so spend it how you like.