Despite the malignant chaos of international politics at present, international literature is having its moment. Gone is the insular complacency once ascribed (perhaps unfairly) to U.S. readers. We now seek out and celebrate work by writers from around the globe, much of it in translation. Where once I might have seen novels by Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon as I ride the F train into the Kirkus office in Manhattan, I now regularly encounter commuters absorbed in the latest by Norwegian superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard (The School of Night), Danish phenom Solvej Balle (On the Calculation of Volume), or Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night). There are more discoveries to be made; here are just a few:
The Week of Colors by Elena Garro (Two Lines Press, 2025): Before Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez bowled readers over with the audacity of One Hundred Years of Solitude, before they were enchanted by the imaginings of Peru’s Isabel Allende in The House of Spirits, Elena Garro of Mexico was preparing the ground for the full bloom of Latin America’s magical realism. This 1964 story collection, translated into English by Megan McDowell, gives U.S. readers a taste of what our reviewer calls Garro’s “fine stylistic sensibility and startling descriptive voice.” The starred review calls these “crucial stories that pierce the heart of the modern world. A must-read.”
More than 65 years after his death, Algerian-born French writer and thinker Albert Camus retains his hold on our moral imaginations, inspiring such fictional engagements as The Meursault Affair, in which Algerian writer Kamel Daoud gives the unnamed Arab of The Stranger his own story. Now Americans can glimpse the Nobel laureate’s mind at work in real time with The Complete Notebooks, translated by Ryan Bloom (Univ. of Chicago, 2025), which “offer a voice-over to the great upheavals of the mid-20th century,” according to our reviewer. “The inner life of a great absurdist, with lessons for us in times of turmoil.”
For a more intimate and personal view, readers can soon turn to to Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, 1944-1959 (Knopf, April 21) in an English translation by Sandra Smith and Cory Stockwell. Camus met the Spanish-born actress when she was 21. He was 30 and already married; their affair continued until his death in a car accident. “As we read, we realize that whatever we are learning from these long-dead lovers pales against what we can learn about ourselves,” writes Kirkus’ critic in a starred review. “A dazzling correspondence from long ago, revived in ardent English.”
While this lovers’ dialogue weighs in at more than 1200 pages, Camus’ French contemporary Simon de Beauvoir is back in American bookstores with what our reviewer calls a “deceptively slim volume,” Lauren Elkin’s translation of the 1966 novel The Image of Her (Yale Univ., Jan. 13). De Beauvoir’s upper-class protagonist—a married mother of two with a career in advertising and a lover on the side—finds herself questioning the supposed perfection of her life. “Though the book is 60 years old, the issues it addresses—about happiness, autonomy, mothers, daughters, the reasons for existence—feel utterly topical,” says Kirkus’ starred review. The best literature—from near or far, old or new—is always au courant.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
