If you’re looking to read more books from around the world, beginning with novellas in translation makes a lot of sense. For reasons I don’t fully understand, a lot of the fiction that gets translated into English is novella length. It may be that the novella is a more dominant form in other countries than it is in the U.S., or it may be that shorter books are easier to translate and therefore easier to publish. Either way, there are many wonderful novellas in translation to choose from.

Personally, I love reading novellas: they are long enough to create the feeling of immersion in a story, but not so long that I, as a slow reader, feel bogged down. They are also a great way to try out new authors and styles without a major investment of time. If you like what you find, you can search out other books by that author or in that style.

Also, if you fall in love with a particular novella in translation, you can seek out other work from that country or region. The books in the list below come from Mexico, Palestine, Japan, Argentina, Switzerland, France, Colombia, and South Korea. Reading one of these might inspire you to learn more about the literary culture and traditions of that place.

You might also find a new favorite author. I have read and loved the books in this list and have gone on to seek out other work by these writers. You might have the same experience!

1

Several years ago, moving into an old but new-to-me apartment with bare white walls, I tacked a poster-size sheet of heavy paper above my desk. Over time, I began to randomly pin found photographs and scraps of stories and poems to this sheet—including a couple of reproductions of Ellsworth Kelly postcards, which I’d torn out of magazines. Every so often, my eyes would stray upward, and these flashes of color would slide into view. I had not thought of them again until very recently, when I heard of an exhibition curated from the four hundred postcards Kelly made and mailed at various points during his seven decades of making art.

I did not think much then about why they appealed to me. Some of the other images on my board were actual found photographs, as in ones I found on the street, including a glossy, black-and-white roadside image of a crime scene, probably photographed by highway patrol, then ripped in half. Like the collages I sometimes made on notebooks containing my first drafts, none of these pictures were meant as literal inspiration; they were just references for daydreaming, vague and strange enough that they might compel some unexpected sentence or train of thought.

In one of the Kelly postcards I’d pinned up, four irregular squarish panels of slightly diluted shades of blue, yellow, green, and red are pasted like a scrim over a landscape of a mountain and lake. They reminded me of endless things, like Baldessari dots that simultaneously redirect the eye elsewhere and draw it back to the point of obfuscation, piquing curiosity about what it conceals. In their pure arrangement of color, the postcards were pleasingly like the faded multicolored flags that flutter over used car lots, like the surprise patterns and colors of paint that emerge on adjacent boarded-up windows when old city buildings are torn down. They were both curtains and windows, shielding what lay behind them and opening into something else.

The painter Peter Nadin was born in 1954 near Liverpool, the son of a sea captain whose family roots stretch back centuries in northwest England. Nadin studied art at Newcastle University and moved to New York in 1976, a time of deep, consequential flux in the city’s art world, when the dominant movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism were giving way to new forms of experimentation, including a rebirth of interest in painting. Nadin plugged almost immediately into a downtown art scene that included young peers like Christopher D’Arcangelo, Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Along with D’Arcangelo he founded the collaborative art site 84 West Broadway, an anti-gallery exhibition space located in his own Tribeca loft, in 1978. And he later became a founder of an unlikely artists’ collective called The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters, whose members—including Peter Fend, Colleen Fitzgibbon, and Robin Winters—offered up their talents as critical thinkers to solve real-world problems for clients. It was a social-practice practice many years (too many years, as it turned out) ahead of its time. 

When I first met Nadin, in 2011, at the insistence of the gallery owner Gavin Brown, a fellow Brit, he had already become something of a myth, having dropped completely out of the commercial art world for almost twenty years. He had become dissatisfied with the machinery of galleries and the limitations it imposed on his work. Instead of showing, he simply kept painting, mostly on a farm that he and his wife, the entrepreneur Anne Kennedy, had bought in the Catskills. Nadin also taught for many years at Cooper Union, and became deeply involved in the life of his farm and of the people who lived around it. I first visited him there to write a profile for The New York Times Magazine. The conversations that began then have continued with some frequency for more than a decade now, mostly in the summers, in the Catskills, looking at paintings, sculpture, plants, animals, mountains, ponds, and sky. After many years of rebuilding his thinking about painting through cycles of conceptual work, Nadin recently returned to what he called “painting from life,” the works heavily grounded in the greenhouse and immediate environs, much of the painting done during a concentrated period of pandemic isolation. A selection of the paintings is the subject of an exhibition now on view at Off Paradise gallery in Tribeca, titled “The Distance from a Lemon to Murder,” open through June 23. Nadin and I recently sat down in the living room of his home in the West Village to pick up the thread once again. 

INTERVIEWER

More than any other artist I’ve ever met, you seem to look at the very big picture of the art-making, the long story, about how we are animals and have, like other animals, evolved to do certain things. Plants do certain things, and animals do certain things, and among the things that Homo sapiens have always done—in fact, we now know it predates Homo sapiens and goes much further back—is make art. Your work is deeply knit up with the history of painting but seems even more knit up with that thinking, about how our species creates culture as a function of what we are, the same way bees make honey. 

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Last week, the Eanes Independent School District, which encompasses part of Austin, Texas, and communities west of the city, opened up information about the status of book challenges in the district. Since March 20, 2022, over 120 books have been submitted for formal reconsideration to the district, which has a single high school, two middle schools, and six elementary schools. Every single book challenge comes from the continually-circulating Moms For Liberty hit list.

All of the challenges come from fewer than ten individuals and the collective Eanes chapter of Moms For Liberty/Eanes Kids First. They come in the weeks prior to school board elections across the state of Texas, including Eanes, where more than one board seat will be determined on Saturday, May 7 (tomorrow). Only Granbury Independent School District and North East Independent School District have seen more challenges this school year.

Eanes Kids First is a “parents rights” group that has developed a thorough collection of books deemed inappropriate, noting not only where those books are in the district but the “issues” within them. Among the reasons the books are a problem? LGBTQ topics, race and diversity topics, and stories tackling mental health. For groups like this claiming that these book challenges are simply about obscenity and vulgarity, the transparency in these lists for why the books are problematic says otherwise. It’s a blatant attack on marginalized people and stories.

Eanes ISD published the slate of book challenges on their website in late April, including the titles, challenger, date, and status of each title, affording transparency to the entire process. Book challengers, who have demanded transparency about the materials being used and available in schools, were appalled by the district’s decision to give them just that.

At the most recent school board meeting, Aaron Silva, partner of one of the book challengers named, used his three minutes during the open comment (beginning at 1:57) to bash the board’s decision to do this. He called it a failure of the board to make such a decision “at the worst possible time.” In the next breath, Silva emphasizes how he and others have demanded clear, transparent communication. He claims parents with good reputations have been strung up and fed to social media over this decision–apparently ignoring the same behaviors advocated for and promoted within the Eanes Kids First/Moms For Liberty groups. Silva is the founder and spearheads the Eanes Parents United podcast, which, according to Franklin Strong’s documentation, “while Eanes Kids First sponsors the podcast, “EKF has absolutely no editorial input into my podcast.  It is me and me only.  The podcast is not an organ for their views and if there are similarities it is only coincidental.”

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A crucial tool for library workers is a strong, updated collection development policy. If it’s been several years since visiting whatever is in place, it is more than worth it to pull it out and update it as your library continues to grow and evolve. It’s vital to keep this updated all the time, but especially during a censorship friendly era, as a collection development policy lays the groundwork for the materials being selected and de-selected and offers patrons a guide to what they can or should expect. But in addition to a strong and current collection development policy, something each and every library needs is an up-to-date, solid challenge policy (also known as a reconsideration policy)/book challenge form.

For decades, the American Library Association (ALA) has provided a reconsideration form template. It offers all of the basics, and gives those who wish to exercise their rights to contest material to do so. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. A healthy democracy encourages input from an array of individuals.

But in an era of increased censorship with no anticipated cooling in sight, it’s time that challenge forms and policies are overhauled across the country.

The purpose of a challenge policy is to protect the professionals within an institution and to protect the rights of those whose tax money funds those institutions. Challenge policies uphold the First Amendment rights of all individuals while providing a formal avenue to address concerns in a uniform manner. This uniformity and consistency is important, as the leading reason for book bans in school libraries right now is a district either choosing not to follow or ignoring their policies for challenges all together. PEN America reports that only 11 school districts have followed their own policies consistently and that doing so reduced the number of books banned in those institutions.

One of the weaknesses in ALA’s template policy and discussion of book challenge policies more broadly is that it allows informal complaints. Informal complaints could be anything from showing up to a board meeting to read offending passages out loud to a parent telling a librarian they are disgusted by a particular title being available. These informal complaints are to be treated the same as a formal complaint. That leaves the door wide open to interpretation from individuals, as well as for administrative overreach (as has been seen again and again).

There are a few immovable truths in the literary community. No two people will read the same story without diverging at least a little in interpretation. Battles between format purists will rage on. Depending on who you’re talking to, color-coding your books will make you either a style icon or a monster, there’s no in-between. And May is Short Story Month.

Here’s the thing: up until, oh, a few days ago, I had no idea why May is Short Story Month. My initial Google search showed nothing but very enthusiastic blogs and websites sharing their plans for the month: we’ll be reading this, reviewing that, and so on and so forth. But I only had to dig a little deeper to find the father of this idea. (Too grandiose? I really like short stories.)

What is Short Story Month?

This is pretty self-explanatory. Short Story Month is a month dedicated to the short story form. It is celebrated by readers and authors alike: the former set out to read as many short stories as possible, while the latter typically set a goal for how many short stories they’ll write. The overachievers often write a short story per day.

Why is May Short Story Month?

On April 7, 2007, Dan Wickett, founder and editor of the Emerging Writers Network (EWN), published a post titled “Short Story Month?”. Drawing inspiration from April being National Poetry Month, Wickett decided to devote the following month to one of his favorite narrative forms by reading and reviewing a short story a day.

Initially, this was meant to be only on EWN, but the book community surprised him. Within days, other blogs and websites had picked up the baton.

A good comic is a good comic, as much as a good novel is a good novel. But there are far too few books which offer the best of both worlds and this is particularly true in YA. It’s rare to find books that offer both a visual element and a narrative, without being either one or the other. Illustrated YA books are a fun twist on format and form, and they allow for pushing not only style boundaries but genre and narrative boundaries as well. They’re works of art in not only the sense that a book is itself a work of art, but also in the sense that they demand the reader consider both art and prose separately — and in conjunction. Why was the choice made to interweave both, rather than choose a more common format?

It’s a shame there are so few illustrated books that aren’t comics in the world beyond picture books, but they do exist. We live in a world that presents multimedia experiences daily, and illustrated YA books allow readers to experience a story in a fresh, creative way.

Let’s take a look at some outstanding examples of illustrated YA books. Some of these are going to lean into art more heavily than prose and yet still offer a reading experience wholly encapsulating of the teen years and all that adolescence has to bring. These books cross genres and category, inviting fiction and nonfiction readers something to seek out and enjoy. And bonus: for teen readers, most of these are developed in a common trim size, so they don’t look or feel like picture books, a common complaint about YA nonfiction prior to the last decade or so.

Note that this list is a little whiter than it should be. I suspect the work included here published by Reynolds and Acevedo will usher in more creative works blending art and prose in the coming years.

Illustrated YA Books That Aren’t Comics

Getting youth to read over the summer can sometimes be a challenge. Luckily, there are several fun and non-stressful ideas out there to keep them engaged with reading. In my opinion, striving for a particular number of books or meticulously noting down which books you’ve read may not be the approach for you and may actually increase the amount of stress you have. Reading one book over the summer might be what you’re aiming for, with the goal to enjoy yourself. That’s why I hope these summer reading program ideas provide some inspiration and enjoyment when it comes to reading for fun this summer.

1. Get Caught Reading

Getting students to read in fun, unique places can entice them to take part in different summer reading programs. Having prizes for the coolest places can also be effective. In the past I’ve had a lot of success with this one, with students having their pictures taken on trampolines, up trees, even in dryers (definitely don’t encourage that one). I usually put an asterisk on these ones as I hope students can provide a review of the book they’ve chosen with the picture, considering the whole idea is for them to choose a book they love!

2. Shared Reading

This one can be tricky but worth it, in my opinion. I get students and staff to choose one book to read over the summer. I try to get them to choose in May or June so I can get more copies of the book. I also strongly encourage them to visit local libraries to borrow the book. I then post regular updates about the book over the summer in the attempt to create a shared experience. The uptake on this program might not be massive but if a student or parent wants to be involved I will do everything I can to get the book into their hands. It’s a lot of fun to get students to vote on which book will be the summer read.

3. Surprise Summer read

I’ve written before about this great program. This works with younger students, teens, and definitely adults. I get people to tell me their favourite genre, which can be anything. I will then take a book from our shelves, wrap it up, and deliver it to them before the end of the school year. I ask that the teachers and students write a review of the book on a recipe / display card that I can then put on display in September. It’s a lot of fun and works really well.

4. Give Away Those Weeded Books

This has to have some clarification. I do not recommend giving away weeded books that are so ratty that they look like the Dead Sea Scrolls. In my experience, we sometimes have books that are in great condition but never circulate for reasons that no one will ever understand. These books might find a home somewhere if they are simply moved to a different location or seen in a different light. This is why I recommend giving them away as part of a relaxed summer reading program. I cannot stress enough the impact of giving away books can have on students: they really love getting books. Having a table of good quality weeded books is a great way to keep them reading over the summer.

There’s a lot going on in every wine glass. This overpriced grape juice has a long history, with some wineries dating back hundreds of years. Oenology (winemaking) has been developing for centuries, and today there has never been more choice among wine. Reading books for beginning wine drinkers will make the wall of wines in your local store far less intimidating.

Unfortunately, wine is still a privileged world that has only been welcoming to non-white, non-male people very recently. Wine experts Desiree Harris-Brown, Tish Wiggins, and Julia Coney have not yet published books, but they provide a necessary perspective as women of color in the historically exclusionary industry.

Wine just doesn’t need to be as pretentious as some people make it out to be. Most wine store owners want to help you find a bottle that you’ll like at their store so you’ll keep coming back — it’s in their best interest to help you. They’re also generally enthusiastic about wine and want you to enjoy it, too. If you want to arm yourself with some background knowledge before entering the store and staring at the shelf of wines, these books will get you started and give some good direction.

Beginning Your Wine Journey

I became aware of Advancing Paul Newman, Eleanor Bergstein’s 1973 debut novel, through Anatole Broyard’s dismissive review, which I came across in some undirected archival wandering. His grating condescension spurred me to read the novel—one of the best minor rebellions I’ve ever undertaken. (Bergstein is best known for writing the movie Dirty Dancing.) “This is the story of two girls, each of whom suspected the other of a more passionate connection with life,” she writes of the protagonists, best friends Kitsy and Ila. The romance of their friendship holds together everything else: trips to Europe to collect experiences (which, of course, often disappoint), becoming or failing to become writers, love affairs and marriages and divorces, their idealistic campaigning for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. But Advancing Paul Newman is not simply a story of friendship, albeit one between two complicated women. The book is also gorgeously deranged and witty, told in fragments and leaps. “Don’t find me poignant, you ass,” Kitsy snaps at her ex when he happens upon her eating alone in a restaurant. After bad sex in Italy, she says matter-of-factly, “This was a good experience because now I know what it feels like to have my flesh crawl.” Ila is “glorious when in love, undistinguished when not in love,” and sleeps with two men on the day of Kitsy’s wedding. “There were reasons.” When she has a story accepted by The New Yorker, the proofs are returned with only one sentence intact: “Madam, the gentleman across the aisle is staring at my upper thighs.” The novel’s title comes from one of Kitsy and Ila’s duties in the McCarthy campaign: to arrive in advance at Paul Newman’s public appearances on behalf of McCarthy. They act as political fluffers, exciting the crowd and leaving for the next event just as Newman’s car pulls up. (Spoiler: they never meet him.) “Why in the world are you doing that, Miss Bergstein?” Broyard asked, frustrated, in his review. I think I know: the search for a passionate connection with life is chaotic; the lives of young women encompass more than a man thinks they should.  

—Elisa Gonzalez
Read Elisa Gonzalez’s entry in our annotated diary series on the Daily here. 

The Swedish novelist Lena Andersson is a genius at conveying characters whose minds have been so thoroughly consumed by idiosyncratic, self-serving logic that they just barely manage to keep up their attachments to other people. I read her newest novel, Son of Svea, late last year, and her 2013 novel, Willful Disregard, last week. The latter’s protagonist, Ester Nilsson, is a icon of limerence: after giving a lecture on a prominent artist, Hugo Rask, and sleeping with him during a week-long tryst, she allows their flickering relationship—which she insists is budding, full of anticipation—to become the predominant organizing principle of her life. Hugo is cold, flinty, and brusque, but to Ester, his unyielding communications are fodder for endless interpretation. I was reminded, while reading, of a quote from Adam Phillips that runs through my brain like an earworm: “Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.”

In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts.

Dear Levin,

No one wants to hear about your parrot. Even your dreams are more interesting. Even the word you stammer in search of to get across the precise nature of the pain in your stomach.

Almost ten years ago, I published a novel called Nevada with a small press called Topside that doesn’t exist anymore. You may or may not have heard of it, but if there are trans people in your life who are readers, they probably have. It became a subcultural Thing. It’s been out of print for a few years, but in June, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will bring it back into print.

People have called Nevada “ground zero for modern trans literature,” and while I get that—before it was published, I don’t think I’d read a novel with a trans character who I didn’t at least sort of hate—I don’t really feel like a genius visionary who invented literature centering marginalized experiences. At the very least, this idea occludes the work other people had done that made Nevada possible. So instead of celebrating myself, I want to use this opportunity to say thanks, and to think through some of the influences and experiences that shaped the novel.

FICTIONMANIA

At one point in Nevada, Maria mentions the “stupid 2002 internet.” At a Q&A following a reading on the 2013 book release tour, I was asked what that meant. I struggled to come up with a decent answer. We are so steeped in for-profit social media today that it’s hard to remember anything else. It wasn’t until the night after that reading, lying awake and beating myself up for not having a good answer, that I thought of a pretty good one. It is a website called Fictionmania. It’s still online. And if you’re hungry for that post-post-vaporwave retro “2002 internet” aesthetic, great news: it hasn’t updated its design since it came online in 1998.

While reading Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, I often caught myself mistaking it for a diary. The memoir details an illicit affair in prose that feels startlingly immediate, full of particulars that seem to surface in real time: a skirt in a Benetton shop; a list of fortune-tellers in the telephone book; the faded lettering of a plaque that reads PASSAGE CARDINET, near where the author sought a clandestine abortion years before. Yet I was continually made aware that time had passed, and this was last year’s love seen through this year’s eyes: “From September last year,” Ernaux writes, near the beginning, “I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come around to my place.” The details of this “most violent and unaccountable reality” have been refracted and altered, distilled into a remarkable book.

I recently read A Girl’s Story, Ernaux’s 2020 memoir of another doomed and passionate love—her first, in the summer of 1958—and was struck by her description of the process by which she reconstructed her former self, the diligence with which she studiedthis young “girl of ’58.” Ernaux googles her summer-camp bunkmates and considers pretending to be a journalist so she can call them up and ask about herself. She looks at a photograph of her long-lost lover’s great-grandchildren. While reading an old diary, and letters she sent to a classmate, she recognizes certain falsenesses in them—pretensions, lies, self-deceptions. The quotations from books she copied down in 1958 now strike her as a more direct means of access to her state of mind then. All memoir involves time travel, and yet Ernaux, as she twists and turns, trying to cross the schisms between her various selves, manages to create what feels like a new tense—a literary time zone that can hold it all at once.

In our Spring issue, the Review published some of the source material on which Ernaux based Simple Passion: selections from her real diaries from 1988, which describe her affair with a married diplomat from the Soviet Union. Here is that violent and unaccountable reality, recorded at a distance of mere hours. Many entries are short, factual, engaged with the torment of love and logistics: “Last night he called. I was sleeping. He wanted to come around. Not possible. (Éric here.) Restless night, what to do with this desire?” Others are breathless and breezy: “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens. I found it on his penis. (I thought of Zola, who lost his monocle between the breasts of women.)” To read them is to encounter something like a pentimento, the revelation of writing underneath other writing—a quality that already suffuses so much of her work. We can, of course, marvel at what Ernaux was able to make of these entries in Simple Passion. But they offer their own distinct and potent pleasures, the rare, delightful, occasionally shocking intimacies of reading someone else’s private thoughts.

To mark the appearance of Ernaux’s diaries, the Review has been asking writers and artists to share pages from their own. Yesterday on our website, we published the first in the series: part of the poet Elisa Gonzalez’s 2018 journal, which documents the aftermath of an affair and a marriage. Reading them now, she, too, had some distance from this former self. “I used to accept, unquestioningly, that pleasure was fleeting,” she writes in a postscript. “but now I think it has an afterlife, during which we integrate it into all the griefs we also feel.”

These diaries feel like gifts, or offerings, that are unlike any other kind of writing. There is, as Ernaux herself writes in a brief introduction, “a truth in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion—something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.”