FINALIST, National Book Award for Translated Literature, 2024

A perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.

The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish--allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell's 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. The Book Censor's Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.

2025 Mildred L. Batchelder Award Winner

2025 USBBY Outstanding International Book

2022 Bologna Children's Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition Winner

2021 The White Ravens Catalog

2021 Tartu Prize for Children's Literature

Everyone deserves a quiet, restful retirement. But for John, a newly retired classroom skeleton, life is just beginning. When John is adopted by Grams and Gramps and leaves the classroom to live on their farm, every day is an exciting new adventure: John rides in the car for the first time, makes a snow angel, scares away crooks, and becomes a source of comfort for Grams, Gramps, and their grandkids. With delightful illustrations and a charming cast of characters, John the Skeleton is a quirky, touching, and unforgettable book. Triinu Laan thoughtfully weaves aging and death into the fabric of life, crafting a tender portrait of what it means to care for one another, grow old together, and appreciate the little things.

Winner of the 2020 Mauricio Achar Award

Does evil lurk in the shadows of the forest or within the human heart? Eduardo Sangarcía's tale of one woman's trial opens the door to deeper horrors.

Anna Thalberg is a villager shunned for her red hair and provocative beauty, so when she is dragged from her home and accused of witchcraft, her neighbors do not intervene. Only Klaus, her husband, and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, set out to Würzburg to prove her innocence. There, locked in a prison tower, Anna faces isolation and torture while anxiety builds over strange happenings within the city walls. Can the two men convince the Church inquisitors to release Anna, or will she burn at the stake?

The Trial of Anna Thalberg is a tale of religious persecution, superstition, and suffering during the Protestant Reformation. While mapping the medieval fear of occultism and demons, it delves into enduring human concerns: the oppression of women, the inhumanity of institutions, and the question of God's existence. Frantic in pace and experimental in form, this is an unforgettable debut from Mexican author Eduardo Sangarcía.

From best-selling Brazilian novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression--by turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region's women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance--and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother's early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

In the utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut of Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman's annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to her remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made more difficult by the intervention of a host of deadly supernatural creatures and a murder detective on her tail.

Can Elina catch the pike and put to rest the curse that has been hanging over her head since a youthful love affair turned sour? Can Sergeant Janatuinen make it back to civilization in one piece? And just why is Lapland in summer so weird?

Fishing for the Little Pike is an audacious, genre-defying blend of fantasy, folk tale, and nature writing.

From award-winning author, editor, and translator Ilan Stavans comes a one-of-a-kind retelling of a legendary Aztec ruler's timeless verses.

A king, a warrior, and a poet, Nezahualcóyotl was a revolutionary ahead of his time. Born in 1402, the ruler--whose name means 'hungry coyote' in the Uto-Aztecan language of Nahuatl--led the city-state of Texcoco through its age of enlightenment. His four-decade reign was among the most transformative and prosperous eras of the Aztec Empire. Today he is a hero in Mexico, seen as a mysterious, powerful, anti-colonial figure.

Brimming with longing, this epic collection of songs and poems was composed by Nezahualcóyotl with members of his illustrious court. Six centuries later, in a powerful translation by Ilan Stavans and with new illustrations by Cuauhtémoc Wetzka, twenty-two poems bring to life a young warrior's journey from exile to historical legend. Anguished and unforgettable, Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl will thrill readers of Latin American literature for years to come.

Who will rule the Holy Land, and at what cost?

In a near-future Jerusalem, harrowing omens plague the city: a desecrated altar, an unbearable stench, a rampant famine. Shaken but devout, Jonathan, the royal family's third son, continues to hold services and offer animal sacrifices at the prophesied Third Temple, built to consecrate the founding of the new Kingdom of Judah. His father, Israel's self-appointed king, has abolished the Supreme Court. The Torah is the law of the land, and only people of the Jewish faith are allowed in. When war breaks out and an angel of God begins to torment Jonathan, warning him of his father's sacrilege, the foundations of the young priest's faith--and then his world--begin to give way.

Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Third Temple plunges readers into a tempest of fanaticism, betrayal, and destruction. Where does the power of man end and the power of God begin? With chilling resonance, this vivid novel from one of Israel's leading authors sounds an unforgettable warning amidst rising extremism.

A 2024 Mildred L. Batchelder Award Honoree

A 2024 USBBY Outstanding International Book

One of Kirkus Reviews' 10 Essential Middle-Grade Books for Fall 2023 -- Starred Review

One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Middle-Grade Family Stories of 2023

A 2023 Cybils Awards Finalist for Speculative Middle Grade Fiction

From the author and translator of the Batchelder Award-winning novel Temple Alley Summer comes the moving story of three generations of women adapting to their new home, and its mythical inhabitants, in the tragic aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake disaster.

In the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, Yui, fleeing her violent husband, and Hiyori, a young orphan, are taken in by a strange but kind old lady named Kiwa in the small town of Kitsunezaki​​. The newly formed family finds refuge in a mayoiga, a lost house, perched atop a beautiful cape overlooking the sea. While helping to rebuild Kitsunezaki, the three adapt to their new lives and supernatural new home, slowly healing from their troubled pasts. Kiwa regales Yui and Hiyori with local legends--from the shapeshifting fox-woman who used to roam the mountains, to the demon Agamé and a sea snake who once terrorized the townspeople, preying upon their grief and fears until they trapped the snake and the demon's claws in an underwater cave.

But when mysterious and sinister events start happening around town, the three fear the worst. Did the earthquake release Agamé and the sea snake into the world again? Kiwa, Yui, and Hiyori join forces with a merry band of kappa river spirits, a bold zashiki warashi house spirit, and flying Jizō guardian statues to save their new family and home and banish Agamé and the snake once and for all. Now a hit anime film, The House of the Lost on the Cape is a heartwarming tale about the strength of family and friendship in the face of natural and mythical forces.

An inspired and urgent prose retelling of the Maya myth of creation by acclaimed Latin American author and scholar Ilan Stavans, gorgeously illustrated by Salvadoran folk artist Gabriela Larios and introduced by renowned author, diplomat, and environmental activist Homero Aridjis.

The archetypal creation story of Latin America, the Popol Vuh began as a Maya oral tradition millennia ago. In the mid-sixteenth century, as indigenous cultures across the continent were being threatened with destruction by European conquest and Christianity, it was written down in verse by members of the K'iche' nobility in what is today Guatemala. In 1701, that text was translated into Spanish by a Dominican friar and ethnographer before vanishing mysteriously.

Cosmic in scope and yet intimately human, the Popol Vuh offers invaluable insight into the Maya way of life before being decimated by colonization--their code of ethics, their views on death and the afterlife, and their devotion to passion, courage, and the natural world. It tells the story of how the world was created in a series of rehearsals that included wooden dummies, demi-gods, and eventually humans. It describes the underworld, Xibalba--a place as harrowing as Dante's hell--and relates the legend of the ultimate king, who, in the face of tragedy, became a spirit that accompanies his people in their struggle for survival.

Popol Vuh: A Retelling is a one-of-a-kind prose rendition of this sacred text that is as seminal as the Bible and the Qur'an, the Ramayana and the Odyssey. Award-winning scholar of Latin American literature Ilan Stavans brings a fresh creative energy to the Popol Vuh, giving a new generation of readers the opportunity to connect with this timeless story and with the plight of the indigenous people of the Americas.

Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.... An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation. --Kirkus Reviews

In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force works without the rights of citizenship, endures miserable living conditions, and is ultimately forced to leave the country. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called guest workers of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs.

Combining the irrepressible linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who've fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish--until they don't, and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony, Unnikrishnan brilliantly maps a new, unruly global English. Giving substance and identity to the anonymous workers of the Gulf, he highlights the disturbing ways in which progress on a global scale is bound up with dehumanization.

Winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Praveen Herat's gripping international thriller is a breathtaking exploration of power, identity, unconditional love, and the question of how far we'll go to uncover the truth.

British war photographer Joseph Nightingale, known to his colleagues as Fearless, is haunted by a brutal past and a present that has grown unrecognizable. Besieged by grief over the loss of his partner and unborn child, he travels to Cambodia, where a reunion with an old friend leads him to a young woman named Song. Imprisoned by circumstance, she, too, is longing for a past she can't reconcile and grappling with the disappearance of her twin sister. Soon after their paths cross, Song vanishes, leaving behind only a mysterious videotape, and Fearless finds himself entangled in a web of transnational sex traffickers, corrupt power brokers, and ruthless arms dealers, where nothing and no one are what they seem.

In a place where human life is cheap and violence is just a means to an end, Fearless and Song must go to new lengths to confront their separate demons. Pulse-pounding and poignant, Between this World and the Next balances devastating cruelty with unexpected redemption. In this arresting page-turner, Praveen Herat blurs the boundaries between good and evil, asking us to reexamine complicity and the consequences of looking the other way.

From prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin comes the contemplative, superbly-crafted story of a woman scapegoated by sudden tragedy, and the unexpected paths she must wander in search of redemption.

Haesoo is a successful therapist and regular guest on a popular TV program. But when she makes a scripted negative comment about a public figure who later commits suicide, she finds herself ostracized by friends, fired from her job, and her marriage begins to unravel. These details come to the reader gradually, in meditative prose, through bits and pieces of letters that Haesoo writes and finally abandons as she walks alone through her city.

One day she has an unexpected encounter with Sei, a 10-year-old girl attempting to feed an orange cat. Stray cats seem to be everywhere; they have the concern of one other neighborhood woman and the ire of everyone else. Like Haesoo and Sei, the cats endure various insults and recover slowly. Haesoo, who would not otherwise care about animals or form relationships with children, now finds herself pulled back by degrees into the larger world.

Electric, defiant, and singing with melancholia, Alejandra Banca's devastating debut throws its arms around a displaced generation of young Venezuelan migrants, reveling in the clamor and beauty of their day-by-day survival.

Below the rooftops of Barcelona's historic avenues, in the shadow of the Sagrada Família and its fleet of construction cranes, thrums a vital pulse: meal-delivery bikers, sex workers, strung out artists, anti-capitalist squatters, undocumented shopgirls, fledgeling drug dealers, and a thousand more lives that cross and knit together at the lowest level of Spain's urban tumult. The young expats of these stories careen through crowded streets, night clubs, and dating apps with a devil-may-care abandon that belies their precarious circumstances. Tragedy will erupt and then ebb in an instant, receding in the rearview like a roadside collision and haunting those that push on. Running on fumes and paltry tips, Banca's beleaguered characters race along a knife's edge and find unexpected solace in moments of shared vulnerability; a knowing thread that unites these strangers in a strange land.

In this English PEN Award-winning translation by Katie Brown, From Savagery announces Alejandra Banca as a resplendent and masterful new voice in Latin American literature--one that will take readers by storm.

Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, sets herself the task of staring at her face in a mirror for three full, uninterrupted hours; her ruminations ripple out from personal and familial memories to wise and honest meditations on families and aging, race and the body. --Minneapolis Star Tribune

What did your face look like before your parents were born? In The Face: A Time Code, bestselling author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. According to ancient Zen tradition, your face before your parents were born is your true face. Who are you? What is your true self? What is your identity before or beyond the dualistic distinctions, like father/mother and good/evil, that define us?

With these questions in mind, Ozeki challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, aging, family, death, the body, self doubt, and, finally, acceptance. In this lyrical short memoir, Ozeki calls on her experience of growing up in the wake of World War II as a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian American; of having a public face as an author; of studying the intricate art of the Japanese Noh mask; of being ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest; and of her own and her parents' aging, to paint a rich and utterly unique portrait of a life as told through a face.

Alternately philosophical, funny, personal, political, and poetic, the short memoirs in The Face series offer unique perspectives from some of our favorite writers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/the-face.

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan's critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather's nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family's legal status in the country has always hung by a thread--for a time, they were illegal. Family, she's told, must be put first.

The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family's ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.

Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

A hilarious, darkly comic graphic retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet in radically condensed prose by legendary Swedish children's author Barbro Lindgren and illustrator Anna H glund.

Look Hamlet.

Hamlet not happy.

Hamlet's mommy dumb.

Hamlet's daddy dead.

So begins this wonderfully strange, dark, and hilarious picture book version of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy boiled down to its smallest possible size: 100 words, give or take, and fifteen etchings that look like the lovechild of Beatrix Potter and Edward Gorey.

In our despondent antihero, a lop-eared bunny Hamlet with handbag in tow, is somehow embodied all the tremendous pathos of Shakespeare's Danish Prince. And in legendary Swedish children's author Barbro Lindgren's pithy prose resides the poetry of the original, reworked for the era of memes and short attention spans.

Bold and brilliant, irreverent and humane, Look Hamlet is the perfect irreverent gift for Shakespeare readers of all ages. As the Bard himself wrote: brevity is the soul of wit.

A rediscovered classic, and the only known novel by Black abolitionist and political exile Louis Timagène Houat, The Maroons is a fervid account of slavery and escape on nineteenth-century Réunion Island.

Frême is a young African man forced into slavery on Réunion, an island east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Plagued by memories of his childhood sweetheart, a white woman named Marie, Frême seeks her out--but when they are persecuted for their love, the two flee into the forest. There they meet other maroons formerly enslaved people and courageous rebels who have chosen freedom at the risk of their lives.

Now available in English for the first time, The Maroons highlights slavery's abject conditions under the French empire, and attests to the widespread phenomenon of enslaved people escaping captivity to forge a new life beyond the reach of so-called civilization. Banned by colonial authorities at the time of its publication in 1844, the book fell into obscurity for over a century before its rediscovery in the 1970s. Since its first reissue, the novel has been recognized for its extraordinary historical significance and literary quality.

Presented here in a sensitive translation by Aqiil Gopee with Jeffrey Diteman, and with a keen introduction by journalist and author Shenaz Patel, The Maroons is a vital resource for rethinking the nineteenth-century canon, and a fascinating read on the struggle for freedom and social justice.

Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-Jin's debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter's queer relationship.

When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. Ideally, a steady income and, most importantly, a good husband with whom to start a family.

But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter's definition of family is not one she can accept. Green's involvement in a campus protest against unfair dismissals of gay colleagues throws her into deeper shambles.

Meanwhile, the nursing home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, an elderly dementia patient who traveled the world as a successful diplomat, chose not to have children, and has no family. Outraged, Green's mother begins to reconsider the unfair consequences of choosing one's own path.

With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love and conflict.

Can killing be an act of love? Hypnotic, gruesome, and exultant, Joy Sorman's macabre ballet whirls from industrial slaughterhouses to the boutique butcher shops of Paris.

Pim is a delicate youth--stringy, solemn, and prone to bouts of unexplained weeping. When he enrolls in trade school as an apprentice butcher, his mentors have low expectations, but his lanky body conceals a peculiar flame: a passionate devotion to animals. In an industry that strives to distance the chopping block from the dinner plate, his ardor might seem like a handicap, but Pim rises through the knife-wielding ranks with a barely-tethered zeal. He scours blood from floor mats and stacks carcasses in the cold room by day. By night he tries to slake his appetites: at the table, over boudin sausage and steak tartare, and in bed, with women whose flanks, ribs, and haunches he maps as they undress each other.

Pim's professional successes mount but his cravings gnaw. In the library he teases out histories, like the blood-drinking forerunners to vampirism or the Medieval trial of a killer pig, sentenced to death by hanging. Meat crowds his waking thoughts. Even as he carves ripe flesh from exquisite bone, he labors to close the gap between man and beast--to be seen, understood, even loved, by a primordial mind. Will this ravenous obsession yield to madness, or to ecstasy?

With shades of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Joy Sorman's Tenderloin is an ethical foray, fever dream, and paean to an ageless hunger. Vegetarians and carnivores alike are invited to feast at this sumptuous literary table. After all, we are what we eat.

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert.

It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City's Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck.

Readers will laugh and cry as they delve into personal stories of assimilation and learn about people from a diverse variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who have made the language their own. The Yiddish saying states: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans and God laughs. How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish illustrates how those plans are full of zest, dignity, and tremendous humanity.