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331 books match the query 'World Literature' and 10 start with o

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Oh, Serafina!

Giuseppe Berto

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Heir to the FIBA button factory in Lombardy, Augustus is profiting from Italy’s postwar industrial boom. Yet the dreamy young man is far from your stereotypical industrialist. He is less interested in making money than in talking to the birds in the surrounding garden and in making love to a beautiful factory worker named Palmira. But when the money-hungry Palmira schemes to have him institutionalized, Augustus finds a new love among his fellow mental patients: flute-playing flower child Serafina. Can Augustus and Serafina find a way to break free and express their love of each other and of nature in this crazy world?

Newly translated into English, Giuseppe Berto’s charming 1973 novel Oh, Serafina! was one of the first works of Italian literature to deal with ecological themes while also questioning the destructive effects of industrial capitalism, the many forms spirituality might take, and the ways our society defines madness. This translation includes a foreword from literary scholar Matteo Gilebbi that provides biographical, historical, and philosophical context for appreciating this whimsical fable of ecology, lunacy, and love.

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Old Floating Cloud

Two Novellas

Can Xue

Northwestern University Press, 1991

Old Floating Cloud brings together two of Can Xue’s early novellas, Yellow Mud Street and the titular Old Floating Cloud.

Yellow Mud Street tells of a street, its people, and a strange event that happens there. The street is dilapidated, though it once saw better times. The “S” Machinery Factory, which used to run day and night, is rusty and decaying, though people still deceive themselves into thinking this factory is a fine place, the envy of “foreign devils” and an important connection with “the authorities.” One day, “a thing” appears. No one is sure if it is a person, a flash of light, or a cloud of will-o'-the-wisp. It prompts rumor, superstition, political slogans, and an investigation by the authorities. A chorus of paranoid preoccupations wind up and down Yellow Mud Street, in a series of muttered refrains that build to a screaming frenzy.

Old Floating Cloud is the ruthlessly unsentimental story of a man who has an affair with his neighbor's wife. Can Xue describes the damage people do to each other, their obsessions, their lack of connection, and their attempts to exert power over one another. Lovers are not the only targets of Can Xue’s biting humor. Resentment flares between parents and children, in-laws spy, and employees abase themselves before their bosses. Like Yellow Mud Street, this novella teems with insects, excrement, and distorted bodies—visceral reminders of our earthbound state.

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On Shaky Ground

V. Domontovych

Central European University Press, 2024

On Shaky Ground is a modernist novel written in the late 1930s and early 1940s and was originally published in Nazi occupied Kharkiv in 1942. One of the best examples of intellectual fiction of the time, the work summarizes the struggles of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when totalitarian reality, together with rampant industrialization, started to affect everyday life.

V. Domontovych is the pen name of Viktor Petrov, a historian and archaeologist, a representative of neoclassicism in Ukrainian literature. The novel follows the trajectory of art historian, Rostyslav Mykhailovych, who goes on a work trip from the capital city of Kharkiv to provincial Katerynoslav (today Dnipro), the place where he spent his childhood. In the late 1920s, a section of the Dnipro River became the place of a major industrial project, the construction of the largest hydroelectric station in Ukraine (Dniprelstan), which flooded the rapids over the river and led to serious ecological and social changes in the region. While the main goal of the trip is to save an old church from being turned into a museum, the journey becomes a philosophical reflection on dislocation and loss of connection with one’s birthplace, traditions, religion and more globally, a sense of security.

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On the Threshold

Short Stories

Dušan Mitana

Seagull Books, 2024

Stories that entwine the mundane with the mystical, written by a cult favorite Slovakian writer.

An unhappily married woman is impregnated by her elderly neighbor who lives in a building across the street and with whom she has never had any physical contact. Just as his attention creates life within her, his own life waxes and wanes with her gaze and attention.

A man finds himself trapped in a pub on a sweltering afternoon after refusing to buy a beer with his cigarettes. Guarded by a vigilante bartender and his beer-obsessed patrons, his every attempt at escape is foiled until their life-giving elixir, the beer, runs out.

This collection introduces English-language readers to the work of Dušan Mitana, a cult figure in contemporary Central European literature. In Mitana’s stories, appearing in English for the first time, the rational and the irrational are indistinguishable. His tales infect a banal, quotidian realism with mystical and supernatural distortions. Tinged with Hitchcockian paranoia and full of unexpected turns, the seventeen stories collected here offer a glimpse into Mitana’s trademark absurdist style.

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One Poor Scruple

Josephine Ward

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world. First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

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Orpheus

By Nazli Eray

University of Texas Press, 2006

Robert Finn's translation of Turkish author Nazli Eray's Orphée makes available to the English-language reader a rewriting of the myth from the perspective of Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. Eray's surrealistic version takes place in a hot resort town in contemporary Turkey. The setting of an archaeological dig gives a connection to the past and literally to the underworld. Found in the dig is a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who proceeds to offer an unusual perspective on modern life and values through mysterious letters carried by a messenger pigeon. Eray also comments on modernity, as the city of Ankara emerges as a character in the novel's fantasy. Set in junta-ruled Turkey of the 1980s, the novel takes its place as a crucial slice of Turkish literary history.

Resonating with haunting references to the film Last Tango in Paris, the novel evolves as a mystery story with a humorous bent. Thus Eray illuminates her insatiable curiosity about other cultures, particularly those of the West. Finally, the style of the translation is simple and clear, with crisp dialogue. Sibel Erol, professor of Turkish literature at New York University, has written an introduction that places this fantastic plot in a literary context, as well as in understandable terms that relate to the reality of today's Turkey.

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Otilia's Body

A Novel

By Sergio Galindo

University of Texas Press, 1994

From reviews of the Spanish edition:

"...among the best works that Mexican fiction has produced."

—Héctor Gally, Sábado

"With homely features, but with a body so shapely and exciting that it sets men (priests included) aflame throughout the novel, with an incandescent voluptuousness and delightful amorality (surely explosive in the conservative Mexican society of her time and place) ...Otilia Rauda could be the protagonist of a Greek tragedy or of a soap opera made of improbable happenings and as many turns of fate as there are chapters used to tell the story of her life."

—Jorge Ruffinelli, Punto y Aparte

Winner of Mexico's prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia prize in 1986, Otilia Rauda is here translated into English for the first time as Otilia's Body. Widely considered Sergio Galindo's best work, the novel dramatizes a sexually liberated woman's obsession with an outlaw lover, played against the backdrop of Mexican history from 1910 to 1940. A fine example of "intimist" fiction, Otilia's Body is noteworthy for its penetratingly described characters who transcend time and place to become universally recognizable.

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Our Little Life

A Novel with Other Archival Texts

By José Antonio Villarreal, edited by Juan Velasco

Lever Press, 2025

Our Little Life is the original title of José Antonio Villarreal’s groundbreaking 1959 novel Pocho, which shaped Mexican-American literature for decades. Pocho narrated the experiences of and challenges to the Mexican-American community in 1930s Silicon Valley through the story of Richard Rubio and his family, ending with the U.S.’s entry into World War II. With this new edition, author and editor Juan Velasco restores Villarreal’s original vision for his novel. Published in cooperation with the Villarreal estate, this edition of Our Little Life is based on archival materials from the Villarreal Special Collection at Santa Clara University.

Our Little Life offers a much longer version of the Pocho story that extends a further 100 pages into the postwar period and follows Richard Rubio’s return from war and the changing shape of Mexican-American life in the 1940s. This newly discovered manuscript reveals Villarreal’s attention to Rubio’s struggles with PTSD and his efforts to depict a community and a family’s struggles with identity, belonging, and survival in postwar California. Our Little Life is an important work of archival recovery that sheds new light on Villarreal’s authorship and his place not only in Mexican-American literature but in the twentieth-century American literary canon.

This first publication of Our Little Life includes a scholarly introduction that places this unpublished novel in the landscape of contemporary Mexican-American literary studies and offers a brilliant examination of how novels grow and change. The volume also includes materials from the Villarreal Special Collection that recontextualize the writer’s vision, editing, and marketing of this and later novels. Our Little Life will be of interest not only to everyone in Mexican-American literary studies, but also to scholars of postwar America, women and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, ethnic studies, and migration and border studies.

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Out of the Darkness

Classic Short Fiction from Sweden

Vendela Vida

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A treasure chest of stories by Swedish authors from the 1880s to the 1950s, many appearing for the first time in English

In the late nineteenth century, Swedish romanticism gave way to vibrant new literary styles that flourished through the 1950s. Out of the Darkness is the first anthology to bring the short fiction of this golden age of Swedish literature to English readers, celebrating the country’s rich literary tradition and several of its most renowned authors. The stories in this volume (many in entirely new translations, and most never before published in English) reflect the arc of the short story in Sweden, from realism to symbolism to modernist experimentation, and stand as lyrical exemplars of the creativity and depth of Swedish literature.

Some stories explore themes of crime and refuge, others ask what makes life meaningful, and some challenge sexual and social constructs of their time. All are fueled by shadows—of evil, madness, or fate, eerie fantasy or grim reality. Including internationally famous authors like August Strindberg, Stig Dagerman, and Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, Out of the Darkness also features writing by influential women such as Victoria Benedictsson and Agnes von Krusenstjerna, who are less familiar to English readers. A showcase of stylistic virtuosity and incisive social commentary, Out of the Darkness at last brings this remarkable period of Swedish prose into the light.

Contributors: Victoria Benedictsson, Hjalmar Bergman, Karin Boye, Stig Dagerman, Thorsten Jonsson, Agnes von Krusenstjerna, Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg, Hjalmar Söderberg.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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