International Fiction Sampler
This page is a supplement to the exhibit International Fiction Sampler, on display in the Ellis Library Colonnade in August 2009.
The books listed below are on display. To find additional books set in other countries do a keyword search in the MERLIN catalog for s:[location] and s:fiction, e.g. "s:iowa and s:fiction"
Algeria: The Lovers of Algeria, by Anouar Benmalek. [A] compelling, richly plotted novel of love and redemption...that adroitly employs old-fashioned storytelling to denounce political oppression. -Entertainment Weekly
Australia: Killing Superman, by Mary-Rose MacColl. The themes of betrayal, grief, family, and war are explored in this compelling novel. At the age of 14, Scott loses his father to the Vietnam War. Now in his 30s, Scott still can't come to terms with his grief and believes his father to still be alive. -Amazon.com
Austria: The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000, edited and translated by Mike Mitchell. This book contains stories that range from the "Freudian" to the "Kafkaesque," to the surreal, grotesque, comic, occult and straightforwardly supernatural. -Dedalus
Belize: Beka Lamb, by Zee Edgell
This novel is a beautiful and lovingly told story of a few months in the life of a young woman growing up in a time and place of constant change. -500 Great Books by Women
Bolivia: American Visa, by Juan de Recacoechea. This novel is about a man desperate to get into America. Mario Alvarez, an English teacher, has come to La Paz, Bolivia, to get an American visa so he can visit his son in Miami. But he cannot get past the embassy bureaucracy. He needs money to bribe corrupt officials for papers, so he draws on his experience with American crime fiction. -Booklist
Brazil: Teeth Under the Sun, by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao. A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the truth about the town's strange status quo and violent past. -Dalkey Archive Press
Burlino Faso: The Parachute Drop, by Norbert Zongo. This novel is both story of the ugliness of postcolonial rule and also the beauty of resistance. -Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Professor- International Center for Writing and Translation, University of California-Irvine.
Cameroon: The Poor Christ of Bomba, by Mongo Beti. The girls who are being prepared for Christian marriage live in the women's camp. It is not clear whether the girls have to stay in the women's camp for such long periods for the good of their souls or for other purposes. -Heinemann Publishers
Canada: How to Become a Monster, by Jean Barbe. A prisoner, known as the Monster, refuses to speak and awaits his trial. A foreign lawyer, who came to assist him, seeks to uncover the reasons behind his mutism and the circumstances surrounding his crimes. -McArthur & Company
Canada: The Hunting Ground, by Lise Tremblay. This collection of uncanny narratives of alienated, fragmented, and eviscerated small-town North American culture and imagination is bracketed on the one hand by the vacuous homilies of "Reader's Digest" and television, and on the other by the senseless primal fury of killing and destruction. -Amazon.com
Chile: Shorts, by Alberto Fuguet. In this collection of short stories, Fuguet's characters struggle with cultural identity within and between North and South America. -Booklist
China: Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, by Can Xue. In this enigmatic collection, the author writes in the artless prose of fairy tales and employs a curious dreamlike logic in her narratives. Characters witness grotesque illnesses, dodge natural catastrophes and wander through dark labyrinths of misunderstanding. -Amazon.com
Colombia: Jail, by Jesus Zarate. This novel tracks the fortunes of a Colombian writer named Antón Castán who finds himself in jail after being accused of strangling a teenage girl. Castán spends the early chapters getting to know his colorful prison companions. -Publisher's Weekly
Cuba: The Insatiable Spider Man, by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Acclaimed for its honest depiction of a Cuban capital characterized by sleaze, sex, poverty and hedonism, in this novel we see the return of its anti-hero, who is again prowling the streets of Havana. -Barnes and Noble
Czech Republic: Povidky: Short Stories by Czech Women, edited by Nancy Hawker. A tour through Prague mixes history and legend with everyday reality, a child's reflections on the Christian concept of sinfulness lead him to resolve to sin "just a little bit," drunken men banter over interminable card games, and a woman's salvation comes in the unexpected form of pickled buttocks. -Telegram Books
Dominican Republic: Of Forgotten Times, by Marisela Rizik. This is a novel about romance, mothers and daughters, and of a dictator. Set in a fictional Caribbean island, it begins at the time of the conquistadors and ends in relatively modern times. The novel focuses on the stories of the women of two different families whose only point in common is the dictator who rules the island nation. -Amazon.com
Egypt: Sugar Street, by Naguib Mahfouz. This third volume of the Cairo Trilogy, a stunning portrait of a family in dissolution, mirrors its setting--an Egypt that is adjusting to the modern world. -Publisher's Weekly
England: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor. This novel has two narratives: first, there's the story of a single day in the lives of the residents of one street somewhere in England, from an old man struggling to tell his wife that he is dying to an eccentric young man who collects errata from the street and burns with unrequited love for one of his neighbors. The second story follows the aforementioned beloved young woman years later, after she learns she is pregnant. -Booklist
Equatorial Guinea: Shadows of Your Black Memory, by Donato Ndongo. Through the idealistic eyes of the nameless protagonist, Donato Ngongo portrays the cultural conflicts between Africa and Spain, ancestral worship competing with Catholicism, and tradition giving way to modernity. -Amazon.com
France: The Mammals: a Novel, by Pierre Merot. The author describes his early-middle-age subject's chosen profession--drinking, not because he is alone but because he wants to be alone--as the exhibitionism of an "accomplished martyr," whose habitat, described in detail, is the bar, to which he goes because like other alcoholics, he feels terrible but is certain that others feel worse. -Booklist
Germany: Rain, by Karen Duve. When Leon Ulbricht lands a contract to write a gangster's memoirs and moves into his dream home, everything seems perfect but then everything goes wrong. A darkly comic tale of a marriage and its undoing, this book takes us to that terrifying place where everything that can possibly go wrong does. -Bloomsbury Press.
Ghana: Changes: A Love Story, by Ama Ata Aidoo. Aidoo writes with intense power in a novel that, in examining the role of women in modern African society, also sheds light on women's problems around the globe. -Publisher's Weekly
Guadeloupe: Crossing the Mangrove, by Maryse Conde. The people of this Guadeloupean villager recount the rumors, family conflicts, and superstitions that focused on this stranger, and in so doing reveal the wider history of their island culture. -- -Library Journal
Guyana: Kwaku: Or the Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut, by Roy Heath. Set in Guyana, this sometimes comic, sometimes tragic novel follows the misadventures of Kwaku Cholmondeley as he comes of age and seeks to rise above the meager conditions of his poor, backwater village. -Library Journal
Haiti: Vale of Tears: A Novel From Haiti, by Paulette Poujol Oriol. This novel is a stark, meditative, and vivid exploration of Coralie Santeuil's life through a series of flashbacks she has on New Year's eve as she makes fourteen stops while walking from one end of the busy city of Port-au-Prince to the other in a last quest to save her life and dignity. -Amazon.com
India: River of Fire, by Qurratulain Hyder. River of Fire encompasses the fates of four recurring characters over two and a half millennia: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril-Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. The most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fiction. -Amazon.com
Ireland: The Brandon Book of Irish Short Stories, edited by Steve MacDonogh. This collection contains some of the outstanding Irish writers of today.
Israel: The Same Sea, by Amos Oz. Amoz Oz gets daring here, blending prose and poetry in an exploration of the tensions among a wayward son, his widowed father, and the son's girlfriend. The characters even scold the author for his shortcomings. -School Library Journal
Japan: Be With You, by Takuji Ichikawa. When Takumi's wife suddenly returns from the grave, he can't believe his eyes. How could such a thing be possible? As Takumi starts looking for answers to these questions, he discovers the secret of his wife's appearance is somehow linked to the past...and the future. -VIZ Media, LLC
Japan: The Woman with the Flying Head, by Kurahashi Yumiko. This is a brief sampling of the richly mythological, fantastical work of an author active in Japanese experimental fiction since the early 1960s but little-known in the West. -Publisher's Weekly
Kenya: I Will Marry When I Want,by Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Mirii. This is the renowned play that was developed with Kikuyu villagers at the Kamiriithu Cultural Centre at Limuru. -Amazon.com
Korea: Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, translated and edited by Marshall R. Pihl and Ju-Chan Fulton. This collection has become the standard English language anthology of post-1945 Korean short fiction, a vivid gateway to the history, society, and culture of contemporary South Korea, reflecting the poignant motif of exile in Korea's experience of modernity. -Amazon.com
Korea: The Book of Masks, by Hwang Sun-won. In his memorable first American collection, Hwang proposes that the divisions we perceive--enemy/ally, growth/decline, North/South--are purely deceptive, artificial. -Publisher's Weekly
Lebanon: Cities of Salt, by Abdelrahman Munif. Set in an unnamed gulf country that could be Jordan sometime in the 1930s, the novel relates what happens to the bedouin inhabitants of the small oasis community of Wadi al-Uyoun when oil is discovered by Americans. -Publisher's Weekly
Macau: The Bewitching Braid, by Henrique de Senna Fernandes. This novel, set in the 1930s, is a tale of forbidden love between a Macanese boy from a privileged family in the "Christian" city and a beautiful water-seller from the "Chinese" quarter of Cheok Chai Un. Amazon.com 
Mexico: The Obstacles, by Eloy Urroz. One of the most remarkable books of contemporary Mexican literature, The Obstacles is the story of young writers coming of age in a world dominated entirely by their own fictions. It tells, in alternating chapters, the stories of two teenagers, Ricardo and Elias, who are characters in each others' novels. -Dalkey Archive Press
Morocco: The Chest, by Mohammed Mrabet. This book of stories takes us into the heart of a timeless Islam. Each story presupposes the existence of a world where magic is a part of daily life. -Tombouctou Publishers
Mozambique: Sleepwalking Land, by Mia Couto. An old man and a young boy, refugees from a civil war, seek shelter in an old bus. Among the belongings of a dead passenger, they find a set of notebooks. As they read them, the tale becomes part of their lives. -Serpent's Tail Publishing
New Zealand: A Man of the People, by David Geary. These stories make an immediate impression with their vigorous, often outrageous humor and with their firm grounding in New Zealand's country towns and suburbs. -Amazon.com
Norway: Gunnar's Daughter, by Sigrid Undset. Set in Norway and Iceland during the 11th century, this is the story of the beautiful, spoiled Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, who is casually raped by the man she had wanted to love. With her child, she builds a life on her own. -Penguin Books
Pakistan: Broken Verses, by Kamila Shamsie. Set in Karachi, this novel tells the story of Aasmaani Inqalab, the utterly likable 31-year-old daughter of feminist icon Samina Akram. Aasmaani has been haunted by the brutal murder of her mother's lover and by her mother's disappearance two years later. She starts receiving clues that her mother may still be alive. -Publisher's Weekly
Peru: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa. One half of the story is an autobiographical account of an aspiring writer, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucho. His success at writing and romance contrasts with the fortunes of Pedro Camacho, the protagonist of the other half of the story, who is a devoted but declining author of radio soap operas. -The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Portugal: My World is Not of This Kingdom, by Jao de Melo. This story revolves around the history of a village in the Azores that include almost mythical characters. "This is a boiling, shocking story...rather like the volcanic creation of the Azores themselves. I cannot name another novel in which a howl is more ferociously unleashed." -Katherine Voz, in her introduction to this novel.
Romania: Nadirs, by Herta Muller. This collection of semiautobiographical stories of the author's bleak childhood in Romania. Her family and community fear God, inherit and pass on superstitions, and gossip endlessly. Muller presents stark portraits of life on small farms in Romania. -Booklist
Russia: The Naked Pioneer Girl, by Mikhail Kononov. Singing "Rio Rita," fifteen-year-old Mucha trudges along the road to her execution. But much more than death, Mucha fears expulsion from the Collective in which she plays a part. Banned even during Perestroika, this extraordinary first novel tackles the last forbidden Russian subject, the siege of Leningrad. -Serpent's Tail Publishing
Scotland: Acid Plaid: New Scottish Writing, edited by Harry Ritchie.
This new anthology of writing from Scotland consists of selections from a number of that country's best writers. The book includes a smattering of just about everything: an essay, a skit, poetry, and fiction. These pieces often carry a sharp bite. -Library Journal
Senegal: So Long a Letter, by Mariama Ba. This is the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction. It has undoubted literary qualities, which seem to place it among the best novels that have come out of our continent. -West Africa
Sierra Leone: Hand on the Navel, by Lemuel Johnson. The author gives voice to a half-forgotten piece of history: The Royal West African Frontier Force which fought for the Allies in Europe, Africa, and Asia during WWI and WWII. -Africa World Press, Inc.
South Africa: The Silent Minaret, by Ishtiyaq Shukri. The friends of a missing young student try to reconstruct his life as they search for him, and what emerges is a picture of a man insisting on a common humanity and finding ways to unify ideologies even as his world is being divided. -Amazon.com
Spain: The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Lucas Corso. A book hunter sets out to authenticate an original manuscript of The Three Musketeers [in this] adventure-serial and crime novel rolled into one. The intrepid, bad-tempered, gin-swilling Corso encounters a host of intriguing characters, including devil worshippers, obsessed book collectors and a hypnotically appealing femme fatale. -Booklist
Sri Lanka: Curfew and a Full Moon, by Ediriwira Sarachchandra. The story explores the relationship between a professor and his students whom he finds drifting away from academic interests and getting involved in revolutionary politics. -Heinemann Educational Books.
Turkey: The New Life, by Orhan Pamuk. Osman is an ordinary engineering student in Istanbul until he comes across a book that changes his life. A sort of quasimystical tract, it provides a guide to a new life that is so irresistible Osman becomes obsessed by it. Soon he meets up with two more devotees of the book, the beautiful Janan and Mahmet, her boyfriend. When Mahmet suddenly disappears, Janan and Osman, who is now totally in love with Janan, set out to find him. -Booklist
Uruguay: The Letters That Never Came, by Mauricio Rosencof. The story of one family, which reaches from Hitler's camps to the Uruguayan junta, is recounted in fragments through the memory of Moishe, as a child, youth, and man. -University of New Mexico Press
Wales: Ghosts of the Old Year: New Welsh Short Fiction. This book collects the winning story and runners-up from the 2001 Rhys Davies Short Story competition. . Some stories are about love and relationships, others about death, loss, and separation. -World Literature Today
Zimbabwe: The Black Insider, by Dambudzo Marechera. Outcasts holed up inside a ruined and deserted faculty building tell of their experiences in the post-colonial disaster zone. -Lawrence & Wishart Publishers