We’re so very grateful to the booksellers who have believed in our books from the start. Booksellers are some of our biggest advocates and sharpest readers, and we’re in awe of everything they do to champion international literature—we couldn’t do what we do without them!
You can browse independent booksellers near you with the Indie Bookstore Finder here.
“The front lines may be the peak of insanity, blossoms of concussive explosions flowing from the whining stem of the shell’s path, but one shucked soldier finds some time to play house behind the lines, fending off billeted officers and aggrieved owners, dreaming that this bubble of calm will remain after the war finally passes. But he finds that you can’t hide from war if you carry it inside you.”
– Paul Theriaulton on An Untouched House, Brookline Booksmith
“I’m reading Bill Johnston’s translation of Jean Giono’s Ennemonde, and have come to love the way Giono nestles a kernel of a story inside descriptions of the natural world and its inhabitants, human and otherwise. These plots are organic; they grow out of the soil.”
– Stephen Sparks on Ennemonde, Point Reyes Books
“First published in 1931-32, this freshly translated masterpiece is an Icelandic Grapes of Wrath, focusing on the plight of struggling fishing families in a tiny village, particularly on the hardships facing women like Salka, who, alone without a family, works and educates herself, becoming an effective seamen’s union organizer . . . Absorbing, inspiring, surprisingly humorous–a great read.”
– Lisa Howorth on Salka Valka, Square Books
“A transcendently beautiful, poignant autofiction from Ørstavik that mirrors the author’s experience loving and living with her own husband as he was dying. This reader knows what it’s like to care for a seriously ailing partner, and the author’s meditations on her experience rang true to me and were very affirming and touching. Ti Amo is a love letter through all the complications that life throws at a partnership. It’s one of my favorite books of the year..”
– Jennifer Ray on Ti Amo, Powells Books
“Moldy Strawberries is a niche collection of queer translated short stories from Portuguese by the late Brazilian author, Caio Fernando Abreu. Coveted with beautiful prose; it is at times, brooding, chaotic, horrific, and romantic. Archipelago Books has captured my interest this year with their ability to select the smallest and yet most impactful books that leave you contemplative and enraptured and longing for more. “
– Dartricia Rollins on Moldy Strawberries, Charis Books & More
“A devilish wit and a tender longing lurk beneath the stark naturalism. These poems, intensely grounded in the real, brush against something bigger, a realm not so much mystical as transcendental.”
– Alex Brooks on The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan, Troubled Sleep
“One of the most remarkable epics, timely and timeless, for where it was written but wherever it can be read, The Mahabharata has fired imaginations for centuries. Writing in English, Karthika Naïr has taken female voices from this work and given them, and the larger work itself, vivid new life. In a dazzling array of poetic forms, Naïr gives voice to the gamut of expression and emotion, voices beset by conflict, by warfare, by forces arrayed against them of circumstance and fate. This is beautiful, utterly human work, a cry from deep in the past, so relevant to here and now.”
– Rick Simonson on Until the Lions, Elliott Bay Book Company
“In deeply moving and beautiful prose, Mukasonga writes semi-autobiographically of the power of women and family and the resilience of the Tutsi people. You see and feel everything in Mukasonga’s prose, translated by the renowned Jordan Stump, the scents and sounds of the cows and the solemn, spiritual moment of milking, the warmth of the sun, and the inconceivable pain, but also resolve, of a survivor.”
– Pierce Alquist on Igifu, Brookline Booksmith