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What was it that flew over with such a terrifying roar? Was it, as many said, the devil, or was it that thing a few had heard of, a flying machine? And those electric lights at Jacob Gallo’s farm, were they witchcraft or were they science?

The theme of this harshly powerful novel is the impact of modern technology and ideas on a few isolated, tradition-bound hamlets in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The old ways are represented by Epifanio Trujillo, the cacique of the region, now ailing and losing his grip on things; by ancient Madre Matiana, the region’s midwife, healer, counselor, and oracle; by penniless Rómulo and his wife Merced. “Progress” is represented by Don Epifanio’s bastard son Jacob, who acquired money and influence elsewhere during the Revolution and who now, against his father’s will, brings electricity, irrigation, fertilizers, and other modernities to the lean lands—together with armed henchmen. The conflict between the old and the new builds slowly and inexorably to a violent climax that will long remain in the reader’s memory.

The author has given psychological and historical depth to his story by alternating the passages of narrative and dialogue with others in which several of the major characters brood on the past, the present, and the future. For instance, Matiana, now in her eighties, touchingly remembers how she was married and widowed before she had reached her seventeenth birthday. This dual technique is superbly handled, so that people and events have both a vivid actuality and an inner richness of meaning. The impact of the narrative is intensified by the twenty-one striking illustrations by Alberto Beltrán.

The original story that hatched Mothra, one of the most beloved monsters in the “kaijuverse”—available in English for the first time

Mystical and benevolent, the colossal lepidopteran Mothra has been one of the most beloved kaiju since 1961, when The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was originally published in Japanese. Commissioned by Tōhō Studios from three of Japan’s most prominent postwar literary writers (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta), the novella formed the basis for the now-classic monster film Mothra, with a protagonist second only to Godzilla in number of film appearances by a kaiju. Finally available in its first official English translation, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra will captivate ardent, longtime fans of the films as well as newcomers.

Written just months after the largest political demonstrations Japan had ever seen, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra reflects the rebellious spirit of the time. In this original story, explorers visit a South Pacific island and capture a group of fairies, inciting the fury of the goddess Mothra, who sets out for Japan on a mission of rescue and revenge. Expressing a powerful social stance about Japan’s need to chart its own foreign policy during the Cold War, the novella’s political message was ultimately toned down in the Tōhō Studios film. Through this translation, Anglophone audiences will discover Mothra as a figure of protest fiction intricately reflecting the complex geopolitical situation in early 1960s Japan.

The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is translated into lively prose by Jeffrey Angles, who also wrote an extensive afterword about the novella’s cultural context, the unusual story of its composition, and the development of the 1961 film. Following Angles’s best-selling translation of the original Godzilla novellas, this new work will once again delight kaiju fans everywhere.

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Originally published in 2011, The Mosquito Bite Author is the seventh novel by the acclaimed Turkish author Barış Bıçakçı. It follows the daily life of an aspiring novelist, Cemil, in the months after he submits his manuscript to a publisher in Istanbul. Living in an unremarkable apartment complex in the outskirts of Ankara, Cemil spends his days going on walks, cooking for his wife, repairing leaks in his neighbor’s bathroom, and having elaborate imaginary conversations in his head with his potential editor about the meaning of life and art. Uncertain of whether his manuscript will be accepted, Cemil wavers between thoughtful meditations on the origin of the universe and the trajectory of political literature in Turkey, panic over his own worth as a writer, and incredulity toward the objects that make up his quiet world in the Ankara suburbs.

At the Ndola Muto Salon Douala, Cameroon, women slip behind closed doors to seek pleasure, refuge, and one another. When young Violette begins work there as a courtesan for women to support her family, she enters a world her mother cannot accept, where desire moves quietly but powerfully. Part sanctuary, part hidden house of pleasure, the salon becomes a mirror of empowerment, longing, and possibility beyond the restrictions of Cameroonian society. Within its walls, Violette encounters a constellation of women who shape her awakening: Lady Budu, the formidable owner; Caroline, who first opens her to joy; and the enigmatic Lady with Sexy Toes, who urges her to imagine a life of her own making. As these lives intertwine in this evocative novel, the salon reveals how tenderness between women can become an act of resistance, defying patriarchy, class, and convention in small but profound revolutions.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Ahmad Mahmoud sets The Neighbors against the backdrop of the oil nationalization crisis that gripped Iran in the early 1950s. His protagonist, Khaled, a young man from a rundown neighborhood in Ahvaz, a city in southern Iran, becomes involved in the struggle to wrest Iran’s oil industry from the British and, as the result of his political activities, comes to realize that there is more to life than the drudgery and poverty his parents and neighbors have experienced.

The Neighbors, published in 1974, cemented Mahmoud’s reputation as a novelist and captured the ethos of a generation—the generation that laid the groundwork for those who continue to struggle for democracy in Iran today. Though the novel received considerable praise and was read widely, its political nature earned the ire of Mohammad Reza Shah’s regime, and the Islamic Republic has objected to its sexually explicit content. This is the first time one of Ahmad Mahmoud’s novels has appeared in English translation.

Recognized in Mexico as one of the country's most important contemporary dramatists, Emilio Carballido has only recently become known in other countries through his plays and short stories. This translation introduces Carballido as a novelist. In The Norther what makes and breaks human relationships is his central interest as he traces the course of a relationship between a widow and a young man. The characters are created as their emotional and psychological outlines are drawn, and it is in the characterization that the hand of the dramatist is revealed. But it is Carballido's novelistic talent that has made The Norther the object of widely divergent interpretations. The critical conflict aroused by this novel is discussed in an Introduction by the translator, Margaret Sayers Peden.

In an unnamed town in the Ecuadorian Andes, a small wooden icon—La Virgen Pipona (the Potbellied Virgin)—conceals the documents that define the town's social history. That history recently has been dominated by the women of the Benavides family, a conservative clan and, not coincidentally, the caretakers of the Virgin. Their rivals are the Pandos, a family led by four old men who spend their days smoking in the park across from the Virgin's cathedral and offering revisionist versions of local and national events. When a military skirmish threatens the Virgin (and the secret in her famous belly), the Benavides women must scramble to preserve their place as local matriarchs—without alerting the old Pandos to the opportunity that might enable them to finally supplant their rivals.

One of Ecuador's foremost contemporary writers, Alicia Yánez Cossío illuminates the complexity of Andean society by placing disenfranchised players such as women and Amerindians onstage with traditional powers such as the military and the church. Folk wisdom, exemplified in The Potbellied Virgin by the beautifully translated proverbs so popular with the Benavideses and the Pandos alike, stands up to historical record. Such inclusiveness ultimately allows the whole truths of Yánez Cossío's subjects to emerge. Only the second of her novels to be translated into English, The Potbellied Virgin (La cofradía del mullo del vestido de la Virgen Pipona) is a funny, focused portrait of Ecuadorian life in the twentieth century.

The Prose of the Mountains contains three tales of the Caucasus by Aleksandre Qazbegi, one of the most prescient and gifted chroniclers of the Georgian encounter with colonial modernity. His stories offer an invaluable counterpoint to the predominantly Russian narratives that have hitherto shaped scholarly accounts of the nineteenth-century Caucasus. “Memoirs of a Shepherd” poignantly chronicles the young author’s decision to pass seven years of his life as a shepherd with Georgian mountaineers. “Eliso” (the name of a Chechen girl) offers one of the most searing accounts on record of the forced migration of this people from their homeland to Ottoman lands. Set in the sixteenth century, “Khevis Beri Gocha” (the name of a Georgian village chief) classically chronicles a tragic misunderstanding between a severe father and his loving son.

The Puppet, a mythic tale of greed and political corruption, traces the rise, flourishing, and demise of a Saharan oasis community. Aghulli, a noble if obtuse man who has been chosen leader of the oasis, hankers after the traditional nomadic pastoralist life of the Tuareg. He sees commerce (understood as including trade in gold, marriage, agriculture, and even recreation) as the prime culprit in the loss of the nomadic ethos. Thus he is devastated to learn that his supporters are hoarding gold.

The novel's title notwithstanding, the author has stressed repeatedly that he is not a political author. He says that The Puppet portrays a good man who has been asked to lead a corrupt society. The subplot about star-crossed young lovers introduces a Sufi theme of the possibility of transforming carnal into mystical love. The Puppet, though, is first and foremost a gripping, expertly crafted tale of bloody betrayal and revenge inspired by gold lust and an ancient love affair.

The Relic is an irreverent fictional autobiography narrating the picaresque adventures of Teodorico, a Portuguese playboy determined to be the sole heir of his absurdly pious, sexually repressed, and tyrannical Auntie. Sent to the Holy Land, he returns with what he presumes is the “relic of relics” in hopes of persuading Auntie to bequeath her vast fortune to him. While in Jerusalem, Teodorico has a vision in which he witnesses Christ's trial and crucifixion and the founding of Christianity—with a twist.

The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni’s Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community’s leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet. They punished him for opposing the use of gold in business transactions—a symptom of a critical break with their nomadic past—and now they must search for a leader who shares their fetishistic love of gold. A desert retreat inspires the group to select a leader at random, but their “choice,” it appears, is not entirely human. This interloper from the spirit world proves a self-righteous despot, whose intolerance of humanity presages disaster for an oasis besieged by an international alliance. Though al-Koni has repeatedly stressed that he is not a political author, readers may see parallels not only to a former Libyan ruler but to other tyrants—past and present—who appear as hollow as a scarecrow.

Hamza Bogary describes a bygone way of life that has now irreversibly disappeared. He speaks of life in Mecca before the advent of oil. Only partly autobiographical, the memoir is nevertheless rich in remembered detail based on Bogary's early observations of life in Mecca. He has transformed his knowledge into art through his sense of humor, empathy, and remarkable understanding of human nature. This work not only entertains; it also informs its readers about the Arabia of the first half of the twentieth century in a graphic and fascinating way. The narrator, young Muhaisin, deals with various aspects of Arabian culture, including education, pilgrimages, styles of clothing, slavery, public executions, the status of women, and religion. Muhaisin is frank in his language and vivid in his humor. The reader quickly comes to love the charming and mischievous boy in this universal tale.

The Sorrowful Eyes of Hannah Karajich is a lyrical, deeply moving story of love and the pain of emancipation, set in the now vanished world of rural East European Jewish village life. Hanna is the most beautiful girl in all Polona, a Hasidic community in the remote province of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Involvement in the exciting new movement of Zionism takes her away to a commune in a nearby town. But there she meets and falls in love with the strangely named Ivo Karajich: a Jew, yet not a Jew. The agonizing drama that follows, plants into her beautiful almond-shaped eyes the hard grain of sorrow that her children, too, will inherit.

Olbracht's novella is both a great love story and a marvellous portrait of a world that modernity threatened and Hitler destroyed.

An incisive novel illuminating a young mother’s reckoning with her own identity and Sámi lineage through the lives and struggles of her ancestors

As a freelance journalist living in France, Marie Engmo has traveled far and wide to write about languages and local cultures threatened with extinction. But when she returns home to Norway for her áhkku’s (grandmother’s) funeral, she recognizes how far she has strayed from her own sense of self and her Sámi identity. Kathrine Nedrejord’s acclaimed novel—winner of Norway’s national book award—is the lucid and compelling story of Marie’s emotional search through her family’s past for a history and legacy that she might bequeath to her own infant daughter.

In spare and elegant prose, Nedrejord illuminates a young woman’s fierce and clear-eyed reckoning with the sacrifice and oppression that has marked the women and men in her family and generations of Indigenous Sámi communities in the northern reaches of Norway. As Marie awakens to the lengths her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother traversed to survive discrimination and displacement, she uncovers and embodies their strength and dignity that are her—and her daughter’s—inheritance. What emerges is an unflinching examination of belonging to a minority that can never dominate, that will always have to negotiate and compromise its place in the world. As stirring as it is troubling, The Sámi Problem is itself an awakening and a literary triumph.

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Through this translation of As Três Marias the literary achievements of Rachel de Queiroz may at last be judged and appreciated by the English-reading public. Since none of her four novels has previously been translated into English, The Three Marias will be, for many non-Brazilians, an introduction to this nationally known South American author whose books have been widely praised for their artistic merits. Her literary works are colored by her projected personality, by an intense feeling for her own people, by an omnipresent social consciousness, and by personal experiences in the arid backlands of her native state of Ceará.

Basing this story on certain of her own recollections from the nineteen-twenties, Rachel de Queiroz tells of a girl growing up in the seaport town of Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil. Fred P. Ellison, whose special field is Brazilian and Spanish-American literature, has captured in his translation the author's graceful style and simplicity of language, and has successfully retained the perspective of an idealistic and gradually maturing girl.

Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Awards’ Silver Prize for Multicultural Fiction

Alarmed by her father’s unexplained disappearance, Julia Castro travels from California to her family’s ancestral home in the Azores to find the islands abuzz with tales of ghost ships, seductive sirens, and witchcraft. The mystery deepens when a drowned man’s body is discovered on a mountainside and an unknown island emerges from the sea. While she is on the hunt for her father, Julia succumbs to the bewitching allure of the islands—and to Nicolau, a fellow musician. History, legend, poetry, and myth are seamlessly interwoven as the novel explores relationships between personal and cultural identity, fate and self-determination, reality and illusion. This revised edition of The Undiscovered Island features a new introduction from Katherine Vaz.