Dance by the Canal by Kerstin Hensel

October 9, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the German by Jen Calleja. Peirene Press, 2017. Originally published in 1994. Purchased. Born the daughter of a famous surgeon and a society hostess, Gabriela von Haßlau is expected to fulfill the high expectations of her parents and, later, the Communist leaders of the East German town of Leibnitz. But Gabriela finds herself unable to please either power structure in her life. To her parents, she is a failure at the violin and at rubbing […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, German, Germany, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Jen Calleja, Kerstin Hensel

Faces on the Tip of My Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano

September 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Peirene Press, 2019. 128 pgs. The short stories included in this collection are connected through its shared characters, the shared setting of rural France, and the shared themes of dispossession, hitchhiking, and suicide. Some of these shared connections are stronger than others; there was, for example, little about the setting that stood out as distinctly French to me. If I had not read about the setting in […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, French, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Emmanuelle Pagano, Jennifer Higgins, Sophie Lewis

The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch

August 7, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2016. Originally published 1910. 121 pgs. Purchased. Amid the political upheaval of the beginning of the twenty century in Russia, the governor of the state university in St. Petersburg shutters the university’s doors and decamps to his summer residence with his family. There, a letter arrives in the post, promising to kill the governor is he fails to take the “right” side by reopening the university. Concerned for […]

Categories: 20BooksofSummer, Crime, Europe, Fiction, German, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Jamie Bulloch, Ricarda Huch

You Would Have Missed Me by Birgit Vanderbeke

July 15, 2019 by Christina

Print – fiction. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2019. Originally published 2016. 154 pgs. Purchased. The early 1960s, a young girl arrives in West Germany from East Germany with her parents. The family is settled into a camp for displaced people where the little girl befriends a family unit consisting of a woman and two men, who instruct the little girl to refer to them as her aunt and uncles. Her parents attempt to sever this […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fiction, German, Germany, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch

The Orange Grove by Larry Tremblay

June 10, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. Peirene Press, 2017. Originally published 2013. 160 pgs. Purchased. Twin brothers, Ahmed and Aziz, live near an orange grove established by their grandfather. The orange grove provides Ahmed and Aziz with a shaded, safe place to play-act, as young children are ought to do. When a bomb falls on the grandparents’ house, the people living on the other side of the mountain – people that Ahmed and Aziz have been […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Fiction, French, Middle East, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Larry Tremblay, Sheila Fischman

Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi

May 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Tin House Books, 2012. Originally published 2001. 110 pgs. Library copy. Rather than recap the book for myself, I’d like to copy the summary provided by the publisher as I think it best incapsulates the haunting tone of this novella: “A single mother takes her two sons on a trip to the seaside. They stay in a hotel, drink hot chocolate, and go to the funfair. She wants to […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, France, French, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Adriana Hunter, Véronique Olmi

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke

May 6, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2013. Originally published 1990. 112 pgs. Library copy. At the start of Vanderbeke’s novella, a mother and her two teenage children sit down to enjoy a feast of mussels, a meal laboriously prepared for the husband who loves mussels and is expected to shortly arrive home with news of a promotion. The scene is set to be one of domestic tranquility, of the home that every German […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, German, Germany, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch

Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

April 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 1997. 192 pgs. Purchased. In 1991, a jar filled with scraps of paper was discovered buried in Kaunas, the former capital of Lithuania. The papers document nearly three years in Dalia Grinkevičiūtė after she deported to a Soviet gulag in Siberia in 1941 at the age of fourteen with her mother and older brother. Grinkevičiūtė had buried the papers in 1950, fearing they would be […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Genocide, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, Delija Valiukenas

Children of The Cave by Virve Sammalkorpi

March 20, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah. Peirene Press, 2019. Originally published 2016. 176 pgs. Purchased. In 1819, Iax Agolasky travels to northwest Russia as the research assistant to a well-known French anthropologist and explorer named Jean Moltique. The goal of Moltique’s exhibition is to locate lost or ancient tribes in the region, and their search leads them to a cave in the Russian wilderness where a small group of children live. Moltique believes […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fantasy, Fiction, Finnish, Peirene Press, Russia, Translated • Tags: Emily Jeremiah, Fleur Jeremiah, Virve Sammalkorpi

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius

December 18, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – print. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2010. Originally published 2006. 125 pgs. Library copy. In January 1943, a young, pregnant woman named Margherita takes a walk through the streets of Rome. Such a walk would be unremarkable where it not for the fact that she came to Rome to be with her husband, a member of the German Army fighting in North Africa. Her German nationality affords her certain benefits in Rome – a […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Europe, Fiction, German, Italy, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Friedrich Christian Delius, Jamie Bulloch

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

December 13, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Latvian by Margita Gailitis. Peirene Press, 2018. Originally published 2015. 196 pgs. Purchased. In Ikstena’s novella, the title refers to the emotional and physically nurturing (not) offered by the oppressive, political regime of the Soviet Union in present-day Latvia. A nameless mother and her nameless daughter serve as the narrators and central focus of the novella with Ikstena following them from 1969 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In Latvian […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Europe, Fiction, Latvian, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Margita Gailitis, Nora Ikstena

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal

October 21, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition. Translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell. Peirene Press, 2011. Originally published 1985. 128 pgs. Library copy. In the nineteenth century, thirteen-year-old Concepció — known as Conxa to her family — is sent to live with her childless aunt and uncle among the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees because her parents have too many children to feed. And Conxa’s position as the youngest girl makes her all the more of a burden to her […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Catalan, Europe, Fiction, Peirene Press, Translated • Tags: Laura McGloughlin, Maria Barbal, Paul Mitchell