MAYBE ONE DAY PLASTIC BAGS WILL BE BETTER THAN GULLS It’s as if the buildings are breaking over people. One, two, puke: big chunks, everyone dead. A couple of architects on speed wanted to play Tetris against each other, and then everything got out of hand. Brutal boulders in washed concrete and steel stand around … Continue reading Crime Fiction Excerpt: Mexico Street by Simone Buchholz (Germany)
WINNER OF THE FRENCH VOICES PRIZE The Paris Commune’s “bloody week” sees the climax of the savagery of the clashes between the Communards and the French Armed Forces loyal to Versailles. Amid the shrapnel and the chaos, while the entire west side of Paris is a field of ruins, a photographer fascinated by the suffering … Continue reading Translated Crime Title Pick: IN THE SHADOW OF THE FIRE by Herve Le Corre (France)
Leena Lehtolainen, born in Vesanto in 1964, is Finland's most successful female crime author, with her titles consistently topping the country’s best-seller lists. More than two million copies of her books have been sold worldwide, and her works have been translated into twenty-nine languages. In addition to her career as an author, Lehtolainen has worked … Continue reading Kiss of Santa: Crime Short Fiction (Finland)
Translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai Chapter 1 - The Three-Fingered Man Before recording the strange history that follows, I felt I ought to take a look at the house where such a gruesome murder was committed. Accordingly, one afternoon in early spring, I set off, walking stick in hand, for a stroll … Continue reading Crime Excerpt: The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo (Japan)
For more than twenty years, Soho Crime has been publishing atmospheric crime fiction set all over the world. Some of Soho’s most popular stories will whisk you away to France, China, England, Laos, Northern Ireland, Thailand, Australia, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Italy, Denmark, India, Cuba, and Palestine, to name but a few. Soho Crime’s list run the … Continue reading Crime Fiction Publisher Spotlight: Soho Crime
The killer was a young Calabrian male whose mother’s virtue had been slandered. He had been in town for only a few days and didn’t know that, in this part of Italy, slandering someone’s mother was almost as common as saying ‘Ciao’. A sad story of cultural misunderstanding. These lines, from Marco Vichi’s Death in … Continue reading ITALIAN CRIME SERIES IN TRANSLATION
This June, we celebrated PRIDE at the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative through focusing on books written by LGBT2QIA+ authors and/or featuring characters that identify with these communities. Many books featured this month are #ownvoices titles, and cover an incredible range of genres; literary fiction, memoirs, young adult fiction, experimental fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, poetry … Continue reading #GlobalPRIDELitMonth: Celebrating PRIDE With LGBTQ2IA+ Literature From Around the World
Stretching from Colombo in Sri Lanka to Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts is about a mixed Tamil and Sinhalese boy named Shivan Rassiah. Hanging over a story that is deeply entrenched in control over power and land, migration, and desire and belonging, is the Buddhist concept of hungry ghosts. The … Continue reading #GlobalPRIDELitMonth: The Hungry Ghosts
Danton Remoto is a writer, educator, media personality, and the founder of Ladlad, the LGBTQ political party of the Philippines. His novel, Riverrun, about a gay young man’s coming of age in a military dictatorship, is one of the first gay novels -- if not the first gay novel -- published in the Philippines. Originally … Continue reading #GlobalPrideLitMonth: Interview with author Danton Remoto
Make way for Kiki! A beloved children’s classic in Japan ever since it was originally published in 1985, Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono has been out of print in English translation for over a decade, despite its continuing fame via Hayao Miyazaki’s animated adaptation. And adaptation it is: there are significant differences between the book and the movie. … Continue reading #WorldKidLitWednesday: Kiki’s Delivery Service
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 