@joshthelibromancer.bsky.social wins the internet today. 👇👇👇👇

“What I saw in this text was not just the pain of gender and patriarchal constraint but the resilience and complexity of identity forged at its margins.” Reading in Translation interviews @izidoraangel.bsky.social about Rene Karabash’s She Who Remains. readingintranslation.com/2025/09/22/i...

Before and after: @bkbookfest.bsky.social table #334 before the book lovers show up. See you today?

After you pick up your @wwborders.bsky.social passport @bkbookfest.bsky.social this weekend, swing by booth #334 to get your passport stamped, and, you know, buy some books!

We’re thrilled that @gayadorno.bsky.social, who is responsible for the brilliant translation from Kurdish of Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories, is one of the literary hosts for this year’s @wwborders.bsky.social gala!

September is both #nationaltranslationmonth and @bkbookfest.bsky.social. So here are some translated novels (and a poetry collection) that will be on sale this Sunday at booth #334. Of course, we’ll have more to choose from. So, swing by, say hey, and buy some books!

Read Vera Mutafchieva’s THE CASE OF CEM (@sandorfpassage.bsky.social) this #TranslationMonth! This novel translated by Angela Rodel is a “blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history.” —Asymptote Journal sandorfpassage.org/product/the-...

For anyone who missed this on Friday, @coryoldweiler.bsky.social wrote a great review of Bedbugs, winner of the 2023 European Union Prize for Literature, @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social. 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇

Haven’t had many opportunities lately to write about fiction from the Balkans, but I’m thankful @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social gave me a chance to review Croatian author Martina Vidaić's novel "Bedbugs," trans. by Ellen Elias-Bursać, about a woman at an inflection point in her life.

“Elias-Bursać’s translation is linguistically lovely and stylistically luxurious.” @coryoldweiler.bsky.social gets under the hood on the translation of Bedbugs and rightly recognizes how this novel distinguishes itself from other contemporary Croatian ones. lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-li...

Annual reminder: The best beaches are #Maine beaches in September.

Happy publication day to Martina Vidaić’s Bedbugs (tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać), winner of the 2023 European Union Prize for Literature. This novel delivers impressive insight into a psyche damaged not by the trauma of war, but by the intrinsic, and often isolating, difficulties of the human condition.

Goodbye #witmonth, hello #nationaltranslationmonth! Of course, for us, most months are all about celebrating a dynamic range of translated work, like these three of our next four releases, including the 2023 EU Prize for Literature winner, Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić, which is out tomorrow!

Bea Vianen’s MY NAME IS SITA (@sandorfpassage.bsky.social) “shadows Sita, a young East Indian girl, as she copes with the loss of her mother and defends herself against her father’s many mistakes.” This 1969 novel translated by Kristen Gehrman is on our #WITMonth list! bookshop.org/p/books/my-n...

This story has it all: aquaculture, Black Flag, Bernie Sanders, Star Trek as policy, John Hodgman, male tears, and a candidate citing Luthen’s monologue from Andor. Meet Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman trying to crack the senate. @grahamformaine.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/1996...

Looking for reading recommendations? Check out what @thebookerprizes.com longlisted authors are reading. We suggest you start with David Szalay’s pick: Robert Perišić’s A Cat At the End of the World, which Szalay calls “a strange, humane and beautiful book.” thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-l...

Interested in contemporary Croatian poetry? Then these #witmonth picks are for you. Collectively, Monika Herceg, Sibila Petlevski, Marija Dejanović, and Ivana Bodrožić have earned widespread critical acclaim and won numerous international prizes for their work.

The best novels provide such a vivid sense of place that readers feel like they’re walking through these worlds. So for this #witmonth appreciation post, two books that drop readers into 1950s Suriname and 1990s Croatia: My Name Is Sita and Underground Barbie (tr. @enaselimo.bsky.social).

Mothers and daughters—it’s complicated. These two #witmonth reads dive deep into these complexities. In Call Me Esteban, a daughter is haunted by the mother she never knew against the backdrop of war and coming out; the mother in Divine Child is alive, but institutionalized. Both are unforgettable.

Know about Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories ( tr. from Kurdish by @gayadorno.bsky.social), the wildly raucous tale of a vehement atheist teaching at a religious school? Check out an excerpt in the excellent fiction issue @thedialmag.bsky.social. www.thedial.world/articles/lit...

Looking for a chunky #witmonth read? Check out these three critically acclaimed novels, two of which are over 500 pages: My Home Somewhere Else; Water, Spiderweb; The Case of Cem. Translated from Italian, Croatian, and Bulgarian, all three of these authors dive deep into identity and language.

Maša Kolanović’s UNDERGROUND BARBIE “captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of the news and the intrigues of sexual curiosity.” This @sandorfpassage.bsky.social novel, translated by Ena Selimović, is on our #WITMonth reading list: bookshop.org/p/books/unde...

On this week’s @literaryhub.bsky.social podcast @drewsof.bsky.social’s “love letter” to Permafrost, praising the “absolutely amazing translation” and how “language can compound in the ear.” And then listen to the interview with Stefan Tobler @andotherstories.bsky.social. lithub.com/on-the-lit-h...

It’s not available yet, but keep an eye out for an excerpt from Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories, as rendered in English by @gayadorno.bsky.social, in this incredible @thedialmag.bsky.social fiction issue.

Happy Women in Translation Month! We’ll be featuring all of these titles over the course of August, including some forthcoming ones. But for now, a collective thank you to all of the immensely talented authors and translators who created these unforgettable books! #wit

“Dragging logs across an ice field is a strongman contest at a carnival.” 🎡 what a truly exquisite sentence 🎡 Treat yourself today. Order this book from @sandorfpassage.bsky.social.

Stealing a few minutes to read a few pages. The narrative intoxicates me, and I’m lulled into a state of peaceful tranquility. But a part of my brain remains vigilant, expecting this not to last. This could be my favorite @sandorfpassage.bsky.social title to date…

Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories (tr. @gayadorno.bsky.social) is on this fab @electricliterature.com list. @lydiakiesling.bsky.social calls it “a breathtaking, virtuosic, dark, funny, furious, sad, and genuinely strange work of fiction.” electricliterature.com/15-novels-in...

Hot off the press in Zagreb, our October, November, and January titles: award-winning Croatian poetry, a wickedly wild Kurdish farce translated by @gayadorno.bsky.social, and a landmark Bulgarian queer novel about a sworn virgin in Albania. Get in touch for ARCs.

The farewell Sabbath concert now reminds me of Bowie's self-conscious exit - and like him, Ozzy was a progenitor of countless cultural descendants and in every state one of the outsized personalities of Rock-qua-Rock, from high phase to decline-and-fall. Rest in Power Chords, John Michael Osborne.

“Dryly funny, delightfully inventive, and politically sharp . . . If you like @rabihalameddine.bsky.social’s style, this is a great book for you!” Samia Saliba on The Competition of Unfinished Stories. www.arabamericanwriters.org/blog/posts/n...

Back in the weird, wild 1970s, the prestigious firm of Alfred A. Knopf ran a crazy experiment in publishing outsider fiction in shiny hardbacks with striking designs and without dust jackets. They called them Borzoi Puppies. Here's a look at the eight puppies in the litter: neglectedbooks.com/?...

Check out Shawn Breathes Books to hear @shawnthebookmaniac.bsky.social interview Underground Barbie author Maša Kolanović. They cover everything from American consumerism to Dubravka Ugrešić and Hernan Diaz’s exceptional In the Distance @coffeehousepress.bsky.social. m.youtube.com/watch?v=dfum...

Portland, Maine, friends: Do you like books, talking about books, and Japanese time-travel sci-fi? Then join me August 5 for the Back Cove Books Book Club, where we’ll be discussing Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi.

The mighty @literaryhub.bsky.social dubs @robrubsam.bsky.social on Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost one of the 5 book reviews you should read from last week: “Just remember that death, as Nick Cave sings, is not the end—not in this novel, at least.” lithub.com/5-book-revie...

We can’t get enough of @robrubsam.bsky.social on Permafrost: It “embraces the natural world’s tactility as a narrative form, carrying stories via earthquakes, sound waves, the rumbling of an icebreaker and the impossible heat of a thermonuclear bomb test.” www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

I reviewed Donald Niedekker's strange, playful, and lightly mind-expanding new novel, out now from @sandorfpassage.bsky.social wapo.st/4l3LULh

This would be a great list even if it didn’t include The Case of Cem. Thanks @dianejosefowicz.bsky.social!

Two weeks have passed but we’re still thinking about all the smart fun had with Donald Niedekker and Jonathan Reeder. After seeing his books arranged at Community Bookstore, Niedekker started talking about how he pens music and leaves it to translators to conduct their interpretation.

Virtuosic legends this evening @spacegallery.bsky.social. Thrilling to hear, and be transported by, the friendship between David Murray and Kahil El’Zabar.

We can aid in that last bit via here: ebbooksellers.com/item/3LN2Xqc...

The real beauty of reading: No two readers experience the same book in the same way. @themountaingoats.bsky.social doesn’t dig the footnotes in The Competition of Unfinished Stories; @patriphobe.bsky.social loves them (as do we). Form your own opinion in November when this Kurdish novel is out.

Two bangers: a Latin America travelogue penned by a Croatian poet and a brilliant story collection that fuses Igbo traditions with the trappings of the 21st-century Nigeria.

We’ve never printed ARCs for a poetry collection. But we’ve never released a collection blurbed by Olga Tokarczuk! Marina Veverec’s translation of Monika Herceg’s Closed Season is stunning. “Herceg writes about a history that no longer belongs to the victors.” Poetry freaks—get in touch!

"And now, almost sixty years after its original publication, Mutafchieva’s superb novel has found an equally superb translator in English: Angela Rodel’s The Case of Cem (2024) performs miracles in bringing this masterpiece for the first time to Anglophone audiences."

“The Case of Cem is ever more relevant today, when fundamental questions of global mobility remain unanswered on the backdrop of mass displacement, refugee crises, political exile, migrant hardships & contested borders and territories.” Stiliana Milkova Rousseva www.turkoslavia.com/post/vera-mu...

Stiliana Milkova's review of Angela Rodel's translation of Mutafchieva's THE CASE OF CEM (2024) @sandorfpassage.bsky.social is the inaugural piece in Turkoslavia's new series—featuring reviews of translations from Turkic and/or Slavic languages, broadly conceived! www.turkoslavia.com/post/vera-mu...

Looking for #pridemonth reading recommendations? How about a coming out tale set against the backdrop of war? Or a 15th-century historical fiction considered Bulgaria’s first gay novel? Maybe you’d like an ARC of a contemporary landmark Bulgarian queer novel?

RIP to Sly Stone. Calling someone a genius has mostly lost meaning, except when you apply it to Sly. I'm glad Questlove gave him a revealing and rewarding documentary with SLY LIVES (AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS). I wrote about it for @ebertvoices.bsky.social.