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Belletrista - A site promoting translated women authored literature from around the world

New & Notable
Whether you are a seasoned reader of international literature or a reader just venturing out beyond your own literary shores, we know you will find our New and Notable section a book browser's paradise! Reading literature from around the world has a way of opening up one's perspective to create as vast a world within us as there is without. Here are more than 80 new or notable books we hope will bring the world to you. Remember—depending on what country you are shopping in, these books might be sold under slightly different titles or ISBNs, in different formats or with different covers; or be published in different months. However, the author's name is always likely to be the same!

USA

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THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC
Julie Otsuka

From the author of When the Emperor Was Divine, comes a novel about a group of women brought from Japan to San Francisco in the early 1900s as mail-order brides. In six unforgettable, incantatory sections, the novel traces their new lives as "picture brides": the arduous voyage by boat, where the girls trade photos of their husbands and imagine uncertain futures in an unknown land … their arrival in San Francisco and the tremulous first nights with their new husbands … backbreaking toil as migrant workers in the fields and in the homes of white women … the struggle to learn a new language and culture … giving birth and raising children who come to reject their heritage … and, finally, the arrival of war, and the agonizing prospect of their internment.

Knopf, hardcover, 9780307700001 (August)

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STONE ARABIA
Dana Spiotta

In the sibling relationship, "there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other," says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik's most passionate and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family's first defense against the world's fragility. Friends die, their mother's memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone's vulnerabilities seem to escalate. Stone Arabia—riveting, unnerving, and strangely beautiful—reexamines what it means to be an artist and redefines the ties that bind.

Scribner, hardcover, 9781451617962

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YOU ARE FREE
Danzy Senna

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities—and envies— the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.

Riverhead, paperback, 9781594485077

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TURN OF MIND
Alice LaPlante

As the book opens, Dr. Jennifer White's best friend, Amanda, who lived down the block, has been killed, and four fingers surgically removed from her hand. Dr. White, a retired orthopedic surgeon, is the prime suspect and she herself doesn't know whether she did it, because she suffers from dementia. Told in White's own voice, fractured and eloquent, a picture emerges of the surprisingly intimate, complex alliance between these life-long friends—two proud, forceful women who were at times each other's most formidable adversaries. As the investigation into the murder deepens and White's relationships with her live-in caretaker and two grown children intensify, a chilling question lingers: is White's shattered memory preventing her from revealing the truth or helping her to hide it?

A stunning first novel and a startling portrait of a disintegrating mind clinging to bits of reality through anger, frustration, shame, and unspeakable loss, Turn of Mind is a remarkable debut that examines the deception and frailty of memory and how it defines our very existence.

Grove Atlantic, hardcover, 9780802119773 (July), Harvill Secker, hardcover, 9781846554636 (July)

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THIS IS NOT YOUR CITY
Caitlin Horrocks

Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks' This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks' women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.

Award-winning author Caitlin Horrocks' stories and essays have appeared in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, and other journals. Currently, she is an assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Sarabande Books, paperback, 9781932511918 (July)

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THE BORROWER
Rebecca Makkai

Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten- year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a knapsack of provisions and an escape plan. Desperate to save him from Pastor Bob and the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embarks on a crazy road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets, an inconvenient boyfriend, and upsetting family history thrown in their path. But is it just Ian who is running away? Who is the man who seems to be on their tail? And should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents?

Rebecca Makkai's short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2009, and 2010, and have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and on NPR's "Selected Shorts". Makkai teaches elementary school and lives north of Chicago.

Viking, hardcover, 9780670022816

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RICH BOY
Sharon Pomerantz

Robert Vishniak is the favored son of Oxford Circle, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1970s Philadelphia. Handsome and clever, Robert glides into the cloistered universities of New England, where scions of unimaginable wealth and influence stand shoulder to shoulder with scholarship paupers like himself who wash dishes for book money. The doors that open there lead Robert to the highest circles of Manhattan society during the heart of the Reagan boom where everything Robert has learned about women, through seduction and heartbreak, pays off. For a brief moment, he has it all-but the world in which he finds himself is not the world from which he comes, and a chance encounter with a beautiful girl from the old neighborhood-and the forgotten life she reawakens-threatens to unravel his carefully constructed new identity.

Twelve, paperback, 9780446563192 (July) New in paper



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DAUGHTER OF PROVIDENCE
Julie Drew

Summer, 1934: Anne Dodge was raised by her old-money, New England Protestant father in the small coastal town of Warwick, Rhode Island. She has always been told that her Portuguese mother abandoned them when Anne was a small child, and died without ever contacting them again. After her mother's death, Anne learns that she has a half-sister, Maria Cristina, who was raised among Portuguese immigrants—and when Maria Christina comes ugly truths begin to surface about what really happened between her parents, catalyzing events that end in loss and rediscovery.

Within the context of New Deal labor strikes and union busting, a hint of desperation pervades the town after five years of economic depression, and a dwindling white, pioneer-stock majority faces immigration that is inevitably changing the order of their world. Daughter of Providence is a beautifully written and moving debut novel by an important new voice in American fiction.

Julie Drew is Associate Professor of English at the University of Akron. She teaches writing, film, and cultural studies. She reviews books for The Cleveland Plain Dealer and has published a number of scholarly articles. Daughter of Providence is her first novel. She lives in Akron, Ohio.

Overlook Press, hardcover, 9781590204627 (August)

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FANTASTIC WOMEN
Edited by Rob Spillman

Fantastic Women assembles the work of eighteen inventive, insightful women authors who steep their narratives in a heady potion of surrealism and macabre black comedy. The results are wildly creative stories that capture the truth about human nature far more than much of the fiction (or, for that matter, the nonfiction) being written today. More and more women writers are creating work that not only pushes the envelope but also folds realistic fiction into an origami dragon, transporting readers into worlds we've never seen before and digging deeper into the psychic bedrock than their male counterparts.
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Contributors include Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Judy Budnitz, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Lucy Corin, Lydia Davis, Rikki Ducornet, Julia Elliott, Samantha Hunt, Miranda July, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, Alissa Nutting, Gina Ochsner, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell, Julia Slavin, and Gina Zucker.

Tin House, paperback, 9781935639107 (August)

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AND YET THEY WERE HAPPY
Helen Phillips

A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world haunted by monsters, plagued by disasters, full of longing—but also one of transformation, wonder, and delight, peopled by the likes of Noah, Bob Dylan, the Virgin Mary, and Anne Frank. Hovering between reality and fantasy, whimsy and darkness, these linked fables describe a universe both surreal and familiar.

"Brilliant miniatures…Like the fables of Calvino, Millhauser, or W.S. Merwin… . Beautifully blends short story and prose poem…. Mermaids, subways, floods, cucumbers, magicians… .The book is a gallery of marvels." —Michael Dirda

Leapfrog Press, paperback, 9781935248187

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THE KID
Sapphire

In The Kid bestselling author Sapphire tells the electrifying story of Abdul Jones, the son of Push's unforgettable heroine, Precious. A story of body and spirit, rooted in the hungers of flesh and of the soul, The Kid brings us deep into the interior life of Abdul Jones. We meet him at age nine, on the day of his mother's funeral. Left alone to navigate a world in which love and hate sometimes hideously masquerade, forced to confront unspeakable violence, his history, and the dark corners of his own heart, Abdul claws his way toward adulthood and toward an identity he can stand behind.

In a generational story that moves with the speed of thought from a Mississippi dirt farm to Harlem in its heyday; from a troubled Catholic orphanage to downtown artist's lofts, The Kid tells of a twenty- first-century young man's fight to find a way toward the future. A testament to the ferocity of the human spirit and the deep nourishing power of love and of art, The Kid chronicles a young man about to take flight. In the intimate, terrifying, and deeply alive story of Abdul's journey, we are witness to an artist's birth by fire.

Penguin Press, hardcover, 9781594203046

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THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
Kate Racculia

The Darby-Jones boardinghouse in Ruby Falls, New York, is home to Mona Jones and her daughter, Oneida, two loners and self-declared outcasts who have formed a perfectly insular family unit: the two of them and the three eclectic boarders living in their house. But their small, quiet life is upended when Arthur Rook shows up in the middle of a nervous breakdown, devastated by the death of his wife, carrying a pink shoe box containing all his wife's mementos and keepsakes, and holding a postcard from sixteen years ago, addressed to Mona but never sent. Slowly the contents of the box begin to fit together to tell a story--one of a powerful friendship, a lost love, and a secret that, if revealed, could change everything that Mona, Oneida, and Arthur know to be true. Or maybe the stories the box tells and the truths it brings to life will teach everyone about love--how deeply it runs, how strong it makes us, and how even when all seems lost, how tightly it brings us together. With emotional accuracy and great energy, This Must Be the Place introduces memorable, charming characters that refuse to be forgotten.

"Racculia's irresistibly charming debut is an artful mix of genres: oddball domestic (set in a boardinghouse, characters named Desdemona and Oneida), coming-of-age (high school loves and teen angst) and literary women's fiction (love, loss, and friendship). …this is a thoroughly enjoyable first novel, both accessibly absurd and quite touching." —Publishers Weekly

Henry Holt, hardcover, 9780805092301

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ONCE UPON A RIVER
Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother. But the river, Margo's childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices.

W. W. Norton & Co., hardcover, 9780393079890