Literary fiction. From an author based in Argentina, and translated from Spanish. Short stories. Mostly quite dark. Some drift towards, and some into, the fantastical. Abducted children who mysteriously return, sort of. Teen Ouija board sessions gone awry. A family whose neighbourhood mistreats a homeless man and then becomes terribly unlucky. A tired ghost in …
Middle grade. Translated from Japanese. A classic that has also been made into an animated film, though I’m not familiar with it. Kiki is a witch. When a witch turns 13, she and her cat must fly on her broom from the town where she grew up to find a new town to be her …
Literary fiction with fantastical elements. The author is from Argentina and the book was translated from Spanish. A girl in a poor neighbourhood of Buenos Aires responds to her mother’s death by compulsively eating dirt. As she gets older, it becomes clear that when she eats earth associated with someone who has been murdered or …
Short stories. Literary. Weird. Translated from Japanese. Many of the stories feature some ordinary complaint in the life of an ordinary woman – to do with work, to do with a relationship, or something else – that is intertwined with some aspect of the world behaving in some manner that is different than we would …
An English translation of a Persian poem remembering the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran – mostly people, both secular and religious, who supported the revolution but then faced repression by the new regime. Published by a small, new, not-for-profit, left publisher run by women of colour in Toronto, Trace Press. I read this …