Tobias Carroll recommends noteworthy new books translated from Tibetan, Vietnamese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and Croatian.

If there is one constant about this place, it is this, that the people on the move (here) all rely on a different set of lies to proceed with their truth(s).

I think that people rediscovered reading in that period of calm when everything was standing still, and no one could go out or do anything.

We must be careful not to equate the word echo with simple repetition, and it speaks to me personally, acutely, about what it means to shift from writer to translator and back again.

I knew I was born here and I would die here.

In the third scene we talk / motionless across a screen in the ether

then there’s the war / that flabby, shriveled, animal word “war”

Tobias Carroll recommends noteworthy new books translated from Ukrainian, Indonesian, Persian, Japanese, and Spanish.

Afterwards, heads of hushed army snipers / pop up on every rooftop.

Architectural gems crumble on street corners, shrouded in grit till they’re decreed too ugly to save.

San feels reassured that Namae’s body is as skinny and pathetic as her own.

One is drawn toward handwritten manuscripts because, unlike more mediated forms of writing (whether produced by typewriters, word processors, or automatic transcription tools), they alone retain the signs of hesitation.

There are many great Arabic children’s books that haven’t reached their young readers yet.

They may even throw us out of this village.

“second time I’ve lost my home,” she utters with hatred / “officially, this time”

Tobias Carroll recommends noteworthy new books translated from Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, and Japanese.

Tempo, for instance: one drop every so often, always the exact same so often, like a time trial in a bicycle race.

In all these years that I’ve spent writing in English, I’ve always felt that my leaning toward literariness was informed by Malayalam.

A headband, you say? You’re ridiculous.

Hold an assault rifle with my hand, use my mouth

we won't recognize this city anymore

The microphones of Radio Antenna Capri are rapt witnesses to a minor page of modern history—even if the chapter of history in question is the saga of the Neapolitan gasconade, not the annals of the pop beat.

Having a kid is the same as enrolling in a lifetime plan of suffering.

Your cheeks are pinked with Parnassus rose.

It is all the more disturbing, then, that neither Gyllenhaal in her interviews nor the film’s end credits or press kit makes any mention of the translator whose work was the basis for the script: Ann Goldstein.

Eight years and I’m still not over it.

I allowed myself to be very playful and unafraid, and to try everything.

Despite this recent wave of SFT, there are still a number of barriers preventing more of it from going mainstream in the Anglophone world.

Answers aren’t always easy to come by in the real world when you’re a kid.

Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books in translation from Morocco, Argentina, Poland, Chile, Sweden, and Tunisia.