Posts by Eamon McGrath

What’s New in Translation: February 2025

February 10, 2025 | in New in Translation, Reviews | by Eamon McGrath, Marcel Krueger, Rosalia Ignatova, and Xiao Yue Shan

February's latest in translation.

In this month’s round-up of recent translations, we present eleven titles from Japan, Iraq, Colombia, Indonesia, Austria, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Slovenia. From neorealist postwar fiction to the graphic novel, stories capturing the tides of time and the turbulent eras of violence, narratives of migration and mystery, innovations of the short fiction form and unconventional looks into classic tales . . . these titles are invitations into hidden places and profound sights, stark realities and dreamy visions.

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A Perfect Day to be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Other Press, 2025

Review by Rosalia Ignatova

Nanae Aoyama’s short novel, A Perfect Day to Be Alone, is the English-language debut of its lauded young author, offering a delicate exploration of existential drift through the eyes of Chizu, a restless twenty-year-old, and Ginko, her elderly relative who takes her in for a year. While the narrative is sparse on action, it is rich in atmospheric detail, focusing on the quiet moments that shape their unlikely cohabitation.

For the Reader Who Cannot Be Bought: On Dubravka Ugrešić’s A Muzzle for Witches

October 10, 2024 | in Reviews | by Eamon McGrath

. . . her writing worked to unsettle, challenge, and dismantle—a process she called “a perestroika of literary values.”

A Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Open Letter, 2024

For thirty years, Dubravka Ugrešić lived in self-imposed exile as a cultural dissident and an enduring critic, challenging the prevailing orthodoxies that fueled anti-intellectualism, oppression, inequality, and nationalism. Her prolific writing—including both fiction and essays—took on topics ranging from the rise of virtual fandoms and the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, to cultural nostalgia and the state of the publishing industry.

A Muzzle for Witches, released this year by her longtime American publisher Open Letter, was Ugrešić’s final book before her death in March 2023. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (the preeminent translator into English of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian authors, including David Albahari, Ivana Bodrožić, Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić, and Robert Perišić), the book is a highly polished transcript of an interview between Ugrešić and literary critic Merima Omeragić.

The book is divided into seven sections, throughout which Ugrešić expounds upon many of the key themes and ideas she addressed in her life’s work. Loosely guided by Omeragić’s brief questions, she focuses on three subjects that are her greatest concerns: the resurgence of Croatian nationalism after the breakup of Yugoslavia; the marginalization of women’s voices, particularly in literature; and the dubious future of contemporary literature itself. Cumulatively, these three areas—in no small part responsible for her extended exile—suggest a grim outlook for the future.