The Book Beat World Lit reading group began in the early 1990s with an emphasis on international books in translation. Meetings were first held at the suggestion of Gayles Chocolates at their coffee/chocolate shop Royal Oak. Several other coffee houses served as meeting places, including the Goldfish Teahouse also in Royal Oak. During Covid measures in 2020 we moved to virtual meetings on Zoom.
Most of our reading group books have remained in print and are available at Book Beat or from Bookshop. If you are already in a book club or have an interest in starting one, please stop by and visit our recommended reading shelves or speak to a bookseller, we’d love to help. Reading books in translation helps widen our understanding of different cultures and nations. The resources below can help you discover new books in translation.
Words Without Borders is a destination for a global literary conversation. Founded in 2003, WWB seeks to expand cultural understanding by giving readers access to contemporary world literature in English translation while providing a vital platform for today’s international writers.
The Center for the Art of Translation champions literary translation.”We are dedicated to finding dazzling new, overlooked, and underrepresented voices, brought into English by the best translators, and to celebrating the art of translation. Our publications, events, and educational programming enrich the library of vital literary works, nurture and promote the work of translators, build audiences for literature in translation, and honor the incredible linguistic and cultural diversity of our schools and our world.”
“A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully” –Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, 1923
Selections below are from past Book Beat discussions:
(Argentina) Borges, Jorge Luis. The Aleph and Other Stories. “He has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories take place.” -John Updike
(Canada) Anne Michaels. Fugitive Pieces. An incandescent, heartbreaking and finally joyful first novel by one of Canada’s foremost poets.
(China) Ha Jin. Waiting captures the poignant dilemma of an ordinary man who misses the best opportunities in his life simply by trying to do his duty–as defined first by his traditional Chinese parents and later by the Communist Party.
(Columbia) Garcia Marquez, Gabrial . Of Love and Other Demons. Compact and dense novel of magic realism and forbidden love. (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1982)
(Egypt) Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma. A short, provocative fable by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author of the Cairo Trilogy that ponders the question: What is the best way to organize a society? (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1988)
(Finland) Hamson, Knut. Hunger. Probes the depths of consciousness with a frightening and gripping power, one of the most influential of 20th century novels. (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1920)
(France) Allain, Marcel and Souvestre, Pierre. Fantomas. A serialized novel and popular mystery series from the early 1900s that had a massive following and influenced the surrealists.
(France) Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature: ‘A Rebours’ The original handbook of decadence, Against Nature exploded “like a grenade†(in the words of its author) and has enjoyed a cult readership from its publication to the present day.
(France) Kaufmann, Jean-Paul. Angel of the Left Bank: The Secrets of Delacroix’s Parisian Masterpiece. “A passionate narrative . . . [a] quiet and insightful meditation on the human skirmish with divinity.” —Los Angeles Times
(Germany) Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. A meditative novel of a child’s identity and memory about Holocaust and its aftermath.
(Germany) Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations. One of the great critical thinkers and essayists of the 2Oth century.
(Germany) Suskind, Patrick, Perfume. Dark novel of identity, mystery, and murder, based on a true story set in 18th century France.
(Holland) Buruma, Ian, Murder in Amsterdam. Exploration of the tension between the Dutch natives and Muslim immigrants living in Holland during the 2004 murder of media personality Theo van Gogh.
(Iceland) Laxness, Halldor, (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1955), Under the Glacier. “A marvelous novel about the most ambitious questions one of the funniest books ever written.” –Susan Sontag
(India) Naipal. V. S , (NOBEL LAUREATE, 2001) Half a Life. “One of those rare books that stands as both a small masterpiece in its own right and as a potent distillation of the author’s work to date, a book that recapitulates all his themes of exile, postcolonial confusion, third world angst, and filial love and rebellion while recounting with uncommon elegance and acerbity the story of the coming of age of its hero, Willie Chandranâ” — New York Times
(Iran) Strapi, Marjane. Persopolis: The Story of a Childhood. wise, funny, and heartbreaking memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. (graphic novel)
(Ireland) Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A semi-autobiographical early novel that pioneers Joyce’s modernist techniques later used in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.
(Israel) Yehoshua, A. B., Open Heart. “The irrational, untamable power of love becomes almost palpable in Israeli novelist Yehoshua’s intense novel of forbidden passion, obsession and spiritual yearning.” –Publisher’s Weekly
(Japan) Akutagawa, Ryuosake, Rashoman and 17 Other Stories. “For the sublimity of life culminates in the most precious moment of inspiration. Man will make his life worth living, if he tosses a wave aloft high into the starry sky, o’er life’s dark main of worldly cares, to mirror in its crystal foam the light of the moon yet to rise.” –Akutagawa
(Japan) Kawabata, Yusunari, (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1968), The Old Capital. “The sexuality is embedded so deeply that it seems barely there, as subtle as the symbolic association among the (feminine) cherry trees, Chieko, the art of the kimono, and Kyoto itself. All epitomize Kawabata’s ideal of beauty, and all are threatened by change.” –New York Times
(Japan) Kawaguchi, Matsutaro, Mistress Oriku: Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse. The story of the sensitive, compassionate and indomitable Mistress Oriku, formerly involved in the pleasure trades of Tokyo, Oriku leaves that life behind to run an elegant teahouse on the city’s outskirts.
(Japan) Murakami, Haruki. After DarK.”A bittersweet novel that will satisfy the most demanding literary taste. . . . Murakami’s fiction reminds us that the world is broad, that myths are universal-and that while we sleep, the world out there is moving in mysterious and unpredictable ways.” –The San Francisco Chronicle
(Japan) Yoshimura, Akira. Shipwrecks, Yoshimura’s exactness is also a passionately concentrated way of investigating the question of what it means to be free — and that breeds tension and finally horror. —New York Times
(Morocco and USA) Bowles, Paul, The Sheltering Sky. A physical and psychic journey across the North African desert that explores a failing marriage and cultural identity.
(Poland) Shulz, Bruno. The Streets of Crocodiles is a fluid dreamlike and mystical collection of inter-woven short stories – an enlightening classic.
(Poland) Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent is a prophetic examination of terrorism and a black satire on English society.
(Poland) Olga Tokarczek , (NOBEL LAUREATE, 2019), Tokarczek’s novel Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Deftly woven into the novel are fragments of history as Chopin’s heart is secretly carried back to Warsaw by his adoring sister.
(Portugal) Saramago, Jose , (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1998), Baltasar and Blimunda. A love story set in the 18th century, Saramago is a brilliant contemporary writer exploring magic realism, surrealism and the disparities between royalty, peasants and the Church.
(Russia) Babel, Issaac. Red Cavalry and Other Stories. Brilliant short stories that relate directly to Babel’s experience as a journalist embedded in the Red Army.
(Russia) Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. One of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost humorous and dark Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.
(Russia) Turgenev, Ivan. Spring Torrents. Autobiographical novel about man’s inability to love without losing his innocence and becoming enslaved to obsessive passion.
(Russia) Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. A masterwork of dystopian Soviet fiction that directly inspired Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.
(South Africa) Coetzee, J. M. (NOBEL LAUREATE, 2003) Waiting for the Barbarians.A novel of race and redemption. The impossible situation of a sensitive person who is a part of an oppressive system.
(Spain) Lafort, Carmen. Nada. A dark and wonderful novel about Barcelona after WWII and a young girl’s return to college and her dysfunctional fallen aristocratic family.
(Spain) Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. A post-modern fable-like novel/adventure Winner of the Booker prize.
(Switzerland) Hesse, Herman, (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1946) Steppenwolf. A beautifully constructed philosophical text which has a vast number of literary and cultural allusions – not a novel in the usual sense of the word.
(UK) Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. A series of interrelated retold and contemporary fairy-tales for adults.
(UK) Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Bookshop. Exquisite short novel about the effects of a bookshop in a small English village.
(UK) Pye, Michael. The Drowning Room. Vivid historical setting in the 17th century about the woman Gretje Reyniers and her adventurous life between Holland and early New York.
(UK) Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Phenomenal novel written in 1818 when the writer was 19 years old – has influenced entire genres (horror, science fiction) and raises many issues linked to today’s society.
(UK) Unsworth, Barry, Morality Play. Set in 14th century England.. Unsworth’s marvelously atmospheric depiction of the poverty, misery and pervasive stench of village life and his demonstrations of the strict rules and traditions governing the acting craft; underlying everything is the mixture of piety and superstition that governs all strata of society.” –Publisher’s Weekly
(UK) Woolf, Virginia, To the Light House. Follows and extends the modernist novel — a masterpiece of emotional observation highlighting the impermanence of adult relationships, autobiographic and poetic.
(USA) Anderson, Sherwood, Winesburg Ohio. Portrait of small town America published in 1919 –a revolutionary novel that inspired Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner.
(USA) Barnes, Djuna, Nightword. A key modernist masterpiece often compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
(USA) Bellow, Saul, (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1976) Ravelstein. A thinly based memoir/novel of a University of Chicago professor who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world.
(USA) Dick, Philip K. Valis. A mystical novel by a visionary science fiction writer, explores the nature of existence and our relationship to God part one of a trilogy.
(USA) Hurston, Zora Neal,Their Eyes Where Watching God. Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. A love story and poetic classic from 1930.
(USA) Johnson, Charles, Middle Passage. “Heroic…engrossing…in the tradition of Billy Budd and Moby Dick…fiction that hooks into the mind.” –The New York Times Book Review
(USA) Morrison, Toni, (NOBEL LAUREATE, 1993) Song of Solomon. “Sprawling and epic, Song of Solomon paints a vibrant picture of Black social life across midcentury America. The coming-of-age novel follows Milkman Dead, a Black man caught in arrested development, as he journeys from his hometown in Michigan to rural Pennsylvania and Virginia in a quest for legendary gold, after a youth full of waste, indecision, and wealth.” -Goodreads review
(USA) Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France – 1885 to World War I. A picture of avant-garde France as seen through the lives of four of its most prominent artists: Alfred Jarry, Apollinaire, Erik Satie and Rousseau.
A Selected Reader’s Bibliography:
Basbanes, Nicholas A., A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books
Baxter, Charles, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
Foster, Thomas C., How to Read Literature Like a Professor
Murphy, Bruce, Ed., Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, fourth edition
Obrien, Geoffrey, The Reader’s Catalog: An Annotated Listing of the 40,000 Best Books in Print in Over 300 Categories, Second Edition
Periodicals: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Bloomsbury Review, Publisher’s Weekly, Guardian /Observer
International Reading is an updated blog first posted as Read Global, Buy Local on Dec 3, 2008.