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Journeying through the emotional migrations of women living in the in-between

In Hilal Isler’s gripping debut story collection, Har Mar, women in the early twenty-first century navigate the complex spaces between countries, families, languages, and selves. Isler’s characters are all on the verge of something—success, rebellion, revelation—and they want to disappear as much as they want to be seen. Moving back and forth between Turkey and the United States, these stories trace migrations both physical and emotional: a nanny plots to flee the wealthy family she cares for in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul; in Har Mar, a quiet mall tucked in the suburbs of Minneapolis, a bookseller escapes her grief in a complicated relationship with a wig retailer; an actress is hired by a famous American novelist to portray her at public events.

The women in Har Mar don’t always make sound decisions, and they’re not trying to be heroes. But they are reaching—imperfectly, but fiercely—for connection, truth, and home. With moving prose and a deep sense of longing, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the margins, to live in translation, and to build a life at the edge of belonging.
 

The first major English translation of Marcelle Tinayre’s Belle Époque novel that interrogates the struggle of coming of age as a young woman in a changing modern world.

Raised in the countryside by her reclusive classicist uncle, Hellé’s ideals are put to the test when she encounters the decadence and frivolity of Parisian society. Yet there she also meets the young political theorist and resolute socialist Antoine Genesvrier, who urges Hellé and her uncle to join him in supporting the city’s poor and advocating for social justice. Meanwhile, Hellé’s head is turned by the poet Maurice Clairmont, hailed by Parisian society as “the new Byron” and eager to win over Hellé with his beauty and charm. Caught between her love of beauty and her burgeoning social concern, Hellé must choose between two men, two ideals, and two worlds, while also staying true to herself. Tinayre infuses Hellé’s voice with the classical allusions of her uncle’s education and her love for the natural world, creating a fresh, engaging narrative that awakens both the mind and heart.

In this first major English translation, Grace Ashton brings exquisite resonance of tone, register, and spirit to Marcelle Tinayre’s perennially relevant novel.

Hend is a young Saudi Arabian woman struggling to challenge her conservative society, which is represented by various soldiers, real and metaphorical, in her life. After a failed arranged marriage to an army officer, she is determined to establish herself as a writer and make her own choices in love. Her mother, a firm supporter of their society’s traditional norms, works to block her efforts. As Hend engages with her mother, stories of her past and those of other female relatives reveal the extent of the suffering previous generations of women have endured while living in such a patriarchal society. Hend also comes to understand how such traditions have adversely affected the men in her family, including one brother who flees to the West and another who finds comradeship among the members of al-Qaeda.

Badriah Albeshr represents a growing number of women writers from the Arabian Peninsula who refuse to shy away from the taboo topics of religion and sexuality, which makes Hend and the Soldiers a valuable read for those seeking insights into the complexities surrounding these issues.

Giuliana Striano is forty years old and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the daughter of Italian emigrants with a daughter of her own, Renata, now five years old. Upon the death of her mother, Giuliana learns that she had been adopted and given a new identity with a different name and a different date and place of birth. So Giuliana determines to find out who she really is, what is hidden in her past, and who her birth parents were. 

Her Name That Day the story of “another” Italy set in a region that only recently became Italian and whose characters are Croatian, Slovenian, Australian, and South African, as well as Italians, precariously perched in a border community filled with secrets and scores to settle with History. Against this backdrop, the narrator endeavors to save a woman encountered by chance on the internet from becoming still another name without a history, another deracinated and disenchanted individual. In prose that is precise and engaging, as though shot through by a sense of pain both silent and inescapable, Pietro Spirito gives shape to an existential thriller in which there are neither guilty parties nor heroes, only victims and survivors.

Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present.

When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of history—his wife's sexual past, the war-torn lives of their families, and the personal allegiances of his friends and enemies. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mussad's wrath or to help Mussad track down and confront his nemesis.

In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."

More than a decade ago, novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa made his first visit to the Historical Archive of the Guatemala National Police, where millions of previously hidden records were being cataloged, scanned, and eventually published online. Bringing to light detailed evidence of crimes against humanity, the Archive Recovery Project inspired Rey Rosa to craft a meta-novel that weaves the language of arrest records and surveillance reports with the contemporary journal entries of a novelist (named Rodrigo) who is attempting to synthesize the stories of political activists, indigenous people, and other women and men who became ensnared in a deadly web of state-sponsored terrorism.

When Rodrigo's access to the archive is suspended, he proceeds to the General Archives of Central America and the Library of Congress, also collaborating with the son of the Identification Bureau's former head in a relentless pursuit of understanding. Reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño's finely honed masterworks, Human Matter is both a tour de force of fiction and a sobering meditation on the realities of collective memory, raising timely questions about how our history is recorded and retold.

Originally published in Spanish in 2009, its success demanded a subsequent publication in June of 2017.