"In 2016, the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri published In Other Words, the story of her quest to learn Italian, which involved moving with her family to Italy to immerse herself fully in her adopted language. The book builds on that account through eight essays that reflect her early career as a translator. One essay uses her teaching of the Echo and Narcissus myth to reflect on the meaning of translation; another describes her decision to translate her own...

"Eddie Robson's Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is a locked room mystery in a near future world of politics and alien diplomacy. Lydia works as translator for the Logi cultural attaché to Earth. They work well together, even if the act of translating his thoughts into English makes her somewhat wobbly on her feet. She's not the agency's best translator, but what else is she going to do? She has no qualifications, and no discernible talent in...

When the murder of a woman is reported to the Shanghai police while Inspector Chen is on vacation, Sergeant Yu is forced to take charge of the investigation. The victim, Yin Lige, a novelist known for her banned book, has been found dead in her tiny, humble room off the stairwell of a converted multi-family house. It seems that only a neighbor could have committed the crime, for the building is kept locked at night. But there is no apparent motive....

Set in 1960s Japan, Plum Wine is a powerful tale about cultural differences, romantic hardships, and the legacy of Hiroshima. An American teaching English in Tokyo, Barbara Jefferson receives an unusual bequest after the death of her colleague and closest friend, Michiko Nakamoto. In a chest are bottles of homemade plum wine, one for each year from 1939 to the present. The paper wrappings on the bottles are covered with Michiko's life story, so Barbara...

"The movement of global populations, and subsequently the task of translation, underlies contemporary culture: the intricacies of ancient and modern Jewish diaspora, generations of colonisation and the transportation of slaves are now superimposed by economic and environmental migration, forced political exiles and refugees. This timely anthology will consider translation's ongoing role in cultural navigation, empathy and understanding disparate experience,...

"An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and...

"Fifty Sounds is a genre-defying meditation on language from an electric new voice. When Polly Barton moved to a remote island in Japan at twenty-one, she did not anticipate the total sensory bombardment: "It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover." Divided into fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases, this elegantly written and deeply introspective memoir recounts her path to grasping the basics and becoming not only a literary translator...