August is Women In Translation month. A significant portion of my personal reading falls under this category across genre. A lot of the publishers I keep up with and challenge me as a reader (New Directions, Dorothy Project, NYRB, Seven Stories Press) focus on translated works. Reading outside of the North American lens is important and also the best way to breathe new life into your reading diet. If you're feeling like everything you're reading is tonally the same lately, I recommend trying to read something thats been translated!

Below are some recommendations, some I've read and some on my own TBR. Let me know in the comments what your favorite translated book is. All books are tagged to this post, and link out to our Bookshop.org site if you'd like to purchase any of them. :-)

• Painting Time: An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter.

• Blowfish: An atmospheric, melancholic novel about a successful sculptor who decides to commit suicide by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish.

• On the Clock: A family saga, a penetrating picture of social inequality, and a coming-of-age story in a compact tale told in two alternating strands.

• Hurricane Season: A novel that takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence--real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it's a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.

• The Employees: The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

• Our Share of Night: A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family.

• On the Calculation of Volume: Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly.

• The Endless Week: A lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.

• So What If I'm a Puta: 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.

• Killing Stella: A domestic horror story that builds to an apocalyptic ending, Killing Stella distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel The Wall into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella. 

• Near to the Wild Heart: The story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence.

• The Hole: The Hole magnifies the plight of some younger adults, particularly women. Work is banal. Childrearing is unappealing. And being a housewife is not, as one of Asa’s older neighbors describes it, “a summer vacation that never ends.” What, the novel asks, is left for a woman to do?