The Lost Golden Land by Ranendra (2014)

Ranendra’s novel is set in Jharkand, one of the most forgotten of Indian states. There, a young man who once participated in demonstrations for the landless and the poor becomes a journalist, then disappears. The mystery of his disappearance takes the reader into the dark worlds of real estate graft and political corruption, but also into the little reported-on worlds of Adavasi communities, most prominently, the Mundas.

10cm Art by Kim Cheom-seon (2002)

The late Korean artist Kim Cheom-seon began making digital art after a diagnosis of frozen shoulder. Along with her images, she wrote accompanying diary entries that cross between autobiography, poetry, and fantasy. Translated with Jeonghyun Mun.

Excerpt in Two Lines (click to buy)

Excerpt in Tripwire (click to buy)

Excerpt in Staging Ground

Excerpt in Asymptote

A Dagger in Water by Khalid Javed (2020)

The contemporary master of dystopia, Khalid Javed writes the allegory of an Indian city in a plague year. As a yellow miasma sits over the city, governmental corruption and personal unhappiness are the main “characters” in this tale.

A Portrait of the West by Qazi Abdul Ghaffar (1924)

Qazi Abdul Ghaffar’s decolonial travelogue tracks the ins and outs of the Khilafat Movement’s delegation to Europe in 1920. Full of precious historical details about the end of the Ottoman Empire and the Indian national freedom struggle, as well as biting satire.

Supported by a grant from the New India Foundation

Days of Becoming by Maël Guesdon (2021)

In this understated volume of prose poetry, Guesdon stakes out a dreamy, subtly humorous terrain where a narrator questions the paths to becoming, and the forces that shape experience. Deeply psychological and yet full of spontaneity and whimsy.

All That Happened in the Year that Was by Stéphane Bouquet (2001)

The first volume of poetry by the innovative French poet-translator. 108 occasional poems are followed by 108 prose “explanations,” the two working in synergy to create a new poetic form of expression. A morbid preoccupation is offset by sexual obsessions in a youthful attempt at managing life’s drives.

Alongside Worlds: A Metaphysical Anthropology by Mohamed Amer Meziane (2023)

In Meziane’s second book, he rereads anthropology to reposition the potential role for belief and practices of belief (religion) as non-symbolic meaning in the lives of world peoples. Meziane relies primarily on Asad Talal and Abdelkébir Khatibi to argue against Philippe Descola’s ontological turn.

A Hamster at School by Nathalie Quintane (2021)

A wry and profound look at the French education system. Quintane, a middle-school teacher and a leading experimental poet, recounts anecdotes from her life as a student and teacher in this memoir lineated as “chapters” of “poetry.”

Parlement of Trees by Patrick Beurard-Valdoye (2021)

One of the leading experimental contemporary French poets guides readers in spirit journeys through the history of European art and ecology. Each poem is entitled after a tree, and many are written in honor of poets, artists, and persons gone before. Here, the reader can visit Artaud’s grave in Marseille, or Benjamin’s resting place in Portbou.

 Manuscript Completed.

Gadjo-Migrandt by Patrick Beurard-Valdoye (2014)

From his cycle of exile series, an epic retelling of intra-European migration in the idiolectic and iconoclastic poetry of Beurard-Valdoye, one of the most irrepressibly experimental poets in France today. In nine “books,” the book takes the plight of the Rromani people across Europe as a representative of the “continent’s” intercultural migration and pent cultural animosities. With a long section on the Objectivists for those with a cross-Atlantic poetic interest.

Excerpt in Alligatorzine

Weeds by Dima Abdallah (2020)

A heart-wrenching love story of a daughter and a father separated by time and space: the daughter having fled to France as a child in exile from Lebanon, and the father, who remains in his home country, despite the violence of the 1983 war and beyond. A vital read for this most underrepresented of literary relationships: the father and the daughter’s story.

Supported by Albertine Translation Grant.

Worried Words by Leeladhar Jagoori (1982)

The last volume of Jagoori’s 1970s poetry that concludes his most productive decade of writing, and that provides the final statement on the tumult and violence of what is perhaps the most important decade in postcolonial Indian history.

 Manuscript Completed.

On This Journey by Leeladhar Jagoori (1974)

The poet’s second volume from the 1970s, bearing witness to an increased sense of direction in the poet’s life. Always independent, Jagoori begins to find his way through the daily horrors of a country finding its footing (and then losing its footing) in a rapidly modernizing decade.

 Manuscript Completed.

Collected Short Stories by Shrilal Shukla (2004)

Never collected in a single volume, this book project puts Shukla’s satirical short fiction and tales together. All but one story have never appeared in English translation. I have translated four to date: “Some Happenings in the News,” detailing an Indian state’s response to a flood; “The End of History,” narrating the ironies of contemporary avatars of colonial history; “Etiquette” and the awkward way that the middle-class attempts to “solve” the historical disenfranchisement of certain sectors of the Indian population; and “The Tale of the Penniless Neighbor,” a tale in how things can always get worse, whenever the Indian governmental bureaucracy gets involved. The book pictured here, published in 2004, was one of the best books I read last year.

At left is the cover to one of his short story collections.

My favorite read from 2021

Please Forgive What I’m About to Say by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi (1969)

Nine humorous essays, written with a novelist’s sense of narrative and a satirist’s wit, this volume contributes to Yousufi’s reputation as perhaps the most accomplished Urdu humor writer of the twentieth century. Includes my personal favorite “Hill Station,” a ribald and deeply cultural look at Quetta, as a vacation spot in the 1960s.