by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins (Canada, Coach House)

by Guðbergur Bergsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Open Letter Books)

by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (France, New Directions)

by Rodrigo Fresán, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden (Argentina, Open Letter Books)

by Santiago Gamboa, translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis (Colombia, Europa Editions)

by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole (Germany, Two Lines Press)

by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff (Switzerland, New Directions)

by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Two Lines Press)

by Romina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft (Argentina, Feminist Press)

by Wu He, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (Taiwan, Columbia University Press)

Featuring a blend of contemporary writers and modern classics, of writers from cultures around the world, and of a variety of stylistic approaches, these shortlists have something for everyone.

On the fiction side of things, there are books from eight different countries and six languages, ranging from Taiwanese author Wu He’s Remains of Life to the postmodern machinations of Guðbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller to Romina Paula’s August. Two other titles of note are Compass by Mathias Énard, which is a finalist for the 2018 Albertine Prize, and Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, which won this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.

The poetry finalists are also quite diverse, featuring books from six different countries, including Greece (Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo) to Japan (Spiral Staircase by Hirato Renkichi) to Brazil (Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno).

Winners from both categories will be announced Thursday, May 31^st as part of the New York Rights Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion (125 West 18^th St.). The announcement will be preceded by a panel starting at 4:30 on “Translated Literature Today: A Decade of Growth.” They will also be announced simultaneously at .

Thanks to grant funds from the Amazon Literary Partnership, the winning authors and translators will each receive $5,000 cash prizes. Three Percent at the University of Rochester founded the BTBAs in 2008, and over the past six years, the Amazon Literary Partnership has contributed more than $140,000 to international authors and their translators through the BTBA.

Past winners of the fiction award include: Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson; Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman; The Last Lover by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen; Seiobo There Below and Satantango, both by László Krasznahorkai, and translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes respectively; Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston; and The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

In terms of the poetry award, past winners include: Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert; Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan; Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong; The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky; Wheel with a Single Spoke by Nichita Stănescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter; and Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander.

This year’s fiction jury is made up of: Caitlin Baker (University Book Store, Seattle), Kasia Bartoszyńska (Monmouth College), Tara Cheesman-Olmsted (), Lori Feathers (), Mark Haber (writer, ), Adam Hetherington (author), Jeremy Keng (reader, freelance reviewer), Bradley Schmidt (translator), and P.��T. Smith (The Scofield).

The poetry jury includes: Raluca Albu (BOMB), Jarrod Annis (), Tess Lewis (writer and translator), Aditi Machado (poet and translator), and Emma Ramadan (translator, ).

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For more information, visit the official site and the official and follow the award on

Also, check out Three Percent for Why This Book Should Win posts for each of the remaining sixteen finalists.

��by Johannes Urzidil, translated from the German by David Burnett (Germany, Pushkin Press)��

Five stories culled from disparate parts of a dead author’s career seems an unlikely candidate for the Best Translated Book Award, but nothing about The Last Bell’s publication seems likely. It is the first-ever English translation, thanks to David Burnett, of a member of Kafka’s Prague circle, a writer Max Brod called “the great troubadour of a Prague forever lost,” who somehow himself got lost through passing decades despite all these years living right under our noses: Urzidil was a Czech immigrant in New York, continuing to produce enigmatic stories in German which earned him a small following there if nowhere else. With the lure of a time capsule or buried treasure, we are drawn to Urzidil, curious to see if this forgotten writer will live up to our enticing idea of him.

Living up to expectations is hard, especially with Kafka as a point of comparison. There’s nothing automatic about the creative spark, and each writer’s art must live or die by its own merits; so while Urzidil’s stories sometimes incorporate surreal elements owing something to Kafka—the talking pickles and reanimated painted woman in “The Duchess of Albanera,” for example—what makes each of the stories in The Last Bell live is that they contain small miracles of empathy, of Urzidil inhabiting a strange mind and illustrating the fears, hopes, and moral conundrums experienced therein.

In the title story, Urzidil somehow manages to turn a hammy below-the-stairs servant comedy into a parable about the choices non-Jewish civilians made during the Holocaust. The story turns on empathy—the tragicomic fact that Marska alone can feel compassion for people like her absent employers, who hastily fled the country as the Nazis started rounding up Jews. Her sister Joska has no such sentimental attachments; she has no qualms about plundering oppressed people. Marska cannot revel in her employer’s riches: “How can it be that something sickens you and yet you guard it like a treasure?” Marska’s position in the class system may have been a subordinate one, but it imbued her with a rigid sense of morality; money doesn’t belong to you if you didn’t work for it. Empathy for her Jewish landlord drives Marska as the story reaches its terrible crisis, and she asks her absent Master (a writer, it so happens!) for empathy in the story’s powerful denouement:

I wonder if he’ll write it down the way I lived it, and everything that went through my mind while it happened? I wonder if he’ll be on my side when they summon him as a witness at the Last Judgment?

Yet empathy in Urzidil’s stories is never divorced from moral instruction. One may take seriously Seigelmann, the travel agent in “Seigelmann’s Journey” whose rich imagination belies the fact that he’s never left his charming little town of Birkenau, without believing that such self-deceits as he engages in are harmless. What justifies placing him in Birkenau, symbolically turning this lovelorn travel agent into a future Nazi, other than obscure, elemental longings Urzidil points to in the soul? Empathy is how Urzidil gets at these springs of motivation, a subject necessary to broach to understand the irruption of racial hatred and violence.

A logical progression drives the hostile behavior of the villagers on the right and left banks of the river in “Where the Valley Ends,” these Bohemian Hatfields and McCoys. Yet Urzidil’s narrator abstracts himself from the conflict—what seems a quaint allegory for industrialization, national hatreds, and war—and describes the quarrel between these two factions in a small village from the perspective of Mother Nature, seeing the root of conflict not in terms of one grievance or racial hatred, but more elementally as part of humanity’s unfettered desire to create meanings and control Nature. For Urzidil, calamity arises from such uncontrolled longings—the strength that is actually weakness. When the protagonist in “The Duchess of Albanera” acts on a moment of daring and steals a painting of the said Duchess, the Duchess in the painting comes to life to tell him he acted not out of courage but out of cowardice, because he was afraid of women, so he needed to steal an inanimate one. Urzidil’s uncanny ability to unearth moral strength, and Burnett’s ability to render that strength in English, in one character’s diminutive position and weakness in another character’s act of daring show exceptional insight, and demonstrate why The Last Bell deserves this award.

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson (Mexico, Deep Vellum)

Books that are part of a series have a tough time getting the recognition they deserve, in general and for awards in particular. The first book comes out and people rave enthusiastically yet they need to see where the rest goes. The middle are a bridge, a getting here to there, appreciated but sort of lost in the process. Then comes the end, the final book, and people have forgotten it all existed. The frantic, absurd pace with which the book world consumes the shiny new book of the month doesn’t allow for culminations. It’s shameful, really, and with Sergio Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” each translated by George Henson, it really, really should be otherwise. The Magician of Vienna deserves to win the 2018 BTBA because on its own it’s an astounding book, and as the end of a trilogy, it pulls disparate ideas together over a huge span.

Pitol died just two days after the longlist was announced. Not that a man as successful as he needed more accolades, but I for one am happy for there to be one more. We shouldn’t let his passing sway us, it’s not a reason for a book to win an award, but it would make for a nice story, wouldn’t it? Either way, his work being recognized in the US is a huge step towards more of it coming, and a deserving win here would push forward with even more momentum.

This trilogy is for people who—like Pitol, like his translator Henson—lead a life where living and literature, reading it, writing it, thinking about it, overlap completely. They are inseparable and to make sense of one is to seek to make sense of the other. In a way, there are no limits to this life. This is memoir, this is fiction, this is literary criticism, and it’s not interested in blending those genres, in thinking on what it means to be cross-genre. Instead, Pitol simply writes as he must. He travels in time as he sorts his memories, travels in time as he sorts history, travels in space as he physically travels, travels in space as he follows the history of foreign authors or their characters. It’s not limited to books however—music, theater, movies, visual art, all of it is invoked, all part of this existence. The breadth is remarkable, and Pitol’s control of it even more so.

He is always in control, and Henson relays that control to English readers. Both are impressive in their skill and art. This isn’t just memory of his life, but remembrances of the books he’s read. The details he pulls, the thoughts he can assemble of the works seem impossible. He does quote books, does revisit them and revisit his own journals, but you get the sense that research, accuracy to facts was not the upmost importance. In his translation, Henson notes errors form time to time, but I imagine they didn’t concern Pitol much. His project was bigger than that. His project was taking a book, like The Third Policeman, from his past and being able to write something like:

This somnambulistic wandering, where the implausible is described with the greatest naturalness, with the same adjectivization that someone would employ to describe the most ordinary events of daily life, is tinged only occasionally with a slight unreality, like the slight out-of-focus of a lens through which someone contemplates a landscape, rests on an ungraspable sadness, broken from time to time, in a brilliant counterpoint, by the commentaries on de Selby and the recreation of the sordid struggle unleashed by his commentators, which has ended up causing them to go mad and driven them to crime.

The Magician of Vienna deserves to win the BTBA for the intellectual achievement that it is. It deserves to win because it is beautiful and it is passionate. It deserves to win for how inclusive it is, how much it warmly pulls into itself to show what kind of man and life that inclusion can form. It deserves to win for how it brings all this together and makes it something enjoyable to read, a rare form of storytelling.

As you may already know, the BTBA finalists will be officially unveiled tomorrow, Tuesday, May 15th at 10am Eastern over at . (And the winners will be unveiled on Thursday, May 31st following the 4:30 pm panel on “Translated Literature Today” at the ��and at The Millions.)

As always, the first person to guess all ten fiction finalists��on their first try��by emailing me at chad.post [a] rochester.edu will will a year’s subscription to Open Letter Books. Here’s the longlist, and here are some clues:

• There are 7 different publishers represented on the shortlist;
• Authors originate from 8 different countries;
• These authors represent 6 different languages;
• Only 1 author has passed away;
• Using both the author’s names and book titles, the only letter that doesn’t make an appearance is Q;
• The average page length of the finalists is 306.7;
• Of the finalists, 3 of the books were published in their original language before 2010;
• Including authors and translators, there are 9 women and 11 men on the shortlist.

There you go! Speculate away! Lobby for your favorites on Twitter (#BTBA2018)! Get ready to argue tomorrow when the ten titles (and six poetry collections) are unveiled!

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Speaking of poetry, I’m willing to give out a subscription if you can name all six of these books on your first try as well.

The clues aren’t as inventive here (I’m technically on a conference call as I write this, so . . . ), but there are also far fewer books on the poetry longlist.

• The finalists hail from 6 different countries (a first in BTBA history?);
• The finalists are all translated from different languages (wow);
• Only one press has two books on this list of finalists.

Good luck!

by��Romina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft (Argentina, Feminist Press)

I initially picked up August because of its beautiful cover and then I read the first sentence.

It was something about wanting to scatter your ashes, something about wanting to scatter you.

The first sentence of August is perfect, it is beautiful, meditative, and for that reason alone August should win the BTBA 2018. Ah, but that would be cheating and August contains so many gorgeous sentences.

In August Emilia travels back to Patagonia to scatter the ashes of her best friend, Andrea, who committed suicide five years earlier. As I read August I felt as though I was eavesdropping on an intimate monologue spoken by Emilia to her dead friend.

Your dad tells me that it’s legal to exhume the body, your body, that you can finally be exhumed and, I mean dealt with.

What August does so well is get into the heart of grief and how grief can swallow one whole.

I don’t know if it’s the white wine that makes it happen or what, I mean my shaking, because I’ve been able to say your name for a while without losing my composure, even been able to talk about what happened, about what happened to you, to say after the death of rather than after the thing with, which as we know tends to lead to confusion.

Once back in her hometown, Emilia stays with Andrea’s parents, wears Andrea’s clothes, and sleeps with her cat. Emilia revisits music and movies they both loved five years ago.

August is a devastating, yet beautiful book, and one of the best books about navigating through the all-consuming fog of grief that I’ve read. For that reason, its gorgeous sentences, and exploration of teenage female friendship, August deserves to win the BTBA 2018. I eagerly await more books by Romina Paula in the future.

by Naivo, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Madagascar, Restless Books)

����������’s Beyond the Rice Fields is the first Malagasy novel ever translated into English. That’s no reason to win the BTBA, but it’s a damn lovely thing, isn’t it? Let’s take a moment and appreciate just what it means for international literature. It’s doing well, seeking out what’s been missed, what countries and cultures are passed over. Yet it also shows the lag. That a book this fantastic, good enough to make the BTBA longlist, is the first to come into English from a country suggests that country probably has other impressive works we’re missing out on, and that other countries, whether anything has landed in English from them or not, also have works it’s unfortunate we’re missing. Not everything can make it to English, obviously, but this type of book is simultaneously encouraging and discouraging.

All of that is well and good, but why should Beyond the Rice Fields? Well, books like this are rare. It’s a book meant for a wide audience, but one that doesn’t sacrifice intelligence or complexity for that audience. Naivo and translator Allison M. Charette tell the history of a changing culture in Madagascar through the intimate lens of two people, a slave, Tsito, and Fara, the daughter of his master. In the early nineteenth century, missionaries and industrials arrive from Europe, from England and France, vying for influence and control of the ruling class and of the people.

As these two grow from children to adults, the world around them changes dramatically. Christianity grows and grows, sometimes in favor with the monarchy, sometimes violently persecuted. Political alliances are uncertain, and that uncertainty is incredibly dangerous. A country once made up of small communities is becoming centrally ruled, with consequences for many. It’s a time when a slave can find his way to freedom, yet remain loyal to his master. Naivo shows the nuances, the excitement, and the terror of all this, without ever being pedantic, without losing the thread of an epic, entertaining story.

Tsito and Fara drive that story. The narrative switches between the two of them, their childhood friendship and play, the closeness that develops as they transition to adulthood, training together for a ritual performance and competition, and the separate paths their lives take. They break and come together again and again. It’s a love story, after all. But Naivo isn’t beholden to the structure of a love story, does not let it become trite. That’s the real impressive move of the book, that as much as it’s historical fiction, a love story, the story of the country boy going to the big city, it’s not just those things. None of those things put demands or limits on the other, and they avoid cliché.

Beyond the Rice Fields deserves to win the BTBA because it’s beautifully written and translated, because it brings to life a landscape and a time period, because it creates complex, engaging, flawed characters, because it lets a reader glimpse history, because the story is intricate, where little pieces, of plot, of character, connect in wonderful ways. It’s a book that readers of varied taste can love.

by Pola Oloixarac, translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey (Argentina, Soho Press)

I would seriously love to write a piece on why Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories (translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey) should win the 2018 Best Translated Book Award, but it’s a Jurgen Klopp / Mo Salah problem.

Should Klopp have played Salah in Liverpool’s second leg of the Championship League semi-final against Roma even though his side was up 5 -2 from the first leg? Do you start your best player when he’s obviously running out of gas and you need him for a critical Premier League match? And is it fair to have Salah (the best player in England, well, maybe Le Bruyne), burn his minutes in a playoff that’s almost a done deal and hamper his chance at the Golden Boot?

This aligns with my participation in the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. I don’t write a lot and when I do, it’s really mind-numbing. I have no aspirations to be a writer, mostly because I have nothing to say. So, even though I’m a big fan of Savage Theories, I don’t want to contribute to the 2018 discussion when I’m going to be on the 2019 jury and I’m going to have to write regular posts and a why-this-book-should-win thing for next year. I should sit on the bench and champion the @BTBA2018 team on.

All I’m going say is that I drop Savage Theories into the same basket as Laurent Binet‘s The Seventh Function of Language (which didn’t even make the 2018 BTBA longlist, seriously, WTF?). Both books made me suspect that I was mistakenly advanced a grade. Or when I got an A in high school physics when it should have been obvious that I had 1) not cracked the textbook, ever, and 2) submitted the same answers on tests as Greg Herlick, who sat right in front of me.

Honestly, I’ve never heard of Palito Ortega or Roger Trinquier or Alfred Adler or Basilides of Alexandria or Philip II of Macedon. Maybe I have, but like beer, I don’t own it, I just rent it. But that doesn’t really matter because Oloixarac’s references are like speed bumps – if you go over them fast enough, they don’t really hurt that much. I admit to doing the Google / Wikipedia thing a few times, maybe more than a few, just to make sure she wasn’t messing with me.

Savage Theories should win this year’s award because it works. Just when you think a shot is going off-frame (another soccer reference) there’s a bend and it hits the back of the net. Like Binet (yeah, I’m going back there again) Oloixarac is insanely, truly insanely, talented and the book gives the oft-justified criticism of literature in translation as dark, depressing and too-serious-for-its-own-good a nice, sharp poke in the something.

by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff (Switzerland, New Directions)

Instant love is well and good. Confident and rejection is the same, if you’re the one doing the rejection. Both are easy to run with, to tell a friend about, to tweet about, to write about. But when you walk away without anything resembling clarity? That’s a goddamned compelling experience, and rare. It sticks in my brain. It nags and nags. It demands I figure it out. How can I move on from a book, movie, person, without knowing what my judgment is? Why can’t I figure it out? What is so special about them that I can’t reach a conclusion with my usual bullheaded ease? I admitted there’s something special, even if I can’t put my finger on it.

I don’t even know how to pronounce her name. Here’s an easy path. I like Lydia Davis. Her stories are very, very short and often obscure. Fleur Jaeggy’s stories in I Am the Brother of XX are very, very short, and often obscure. So I should like her? Months after reading the book, still thinking about it, still compelled to read and reread, the answer is yeah, I like her work. I love her work. It’s strange, it’s compelling, it’s demanding. These stories are short, the sentences simple. It’s easy to read quickly. Reading quickly would be a huge mistake, would do a service to nobody, would let these stories slip through the cracks in your thoughts instead of latch on until you can make sense of them. Or maybe you won’t even make sense of them, but they’ll stick there, letting you work at them again and again, releasing pleasure as you do.

Gini Alhadeff translated stories that are both subtle and outrageous, like “The Heir.” It opens with straight clarity: “Hannelore, a girl without a fixed residence, is the only witness to a fire in the apartment of Fräulein von Oelix. A modest, gray afternoon. Vitreous. The fräulein is a kind woman, wilted and very lonely.” Next there’s a neat summary of their relationship. It quickly turns to madness. Hannelore is not just a witness to the fire:

She is playing, too. She ducked the flames nimbly, she was using a wool blanket as a shield. The adorable little warrior. The apartment is semi-destroyed. The girl did not call the firefighters. The portraits fall. The fire, Hannelore thinks, shows its vocation to annihilate. The word vocation, she said to the flames in a knowing tone, regards you, fire, because has a primordial force that triggers our actions.

This fury continues as the fire rages and the girl dances and basks, her thoughts glorifying the destruction.

The story then steps back again towards calmness, to the relationship between the two, from the fräulien’s perspective. She has no one but Hannah, who cares for her, who is good to her, and so “Her state of mind was exhilaration. The exhilaration of being in a position to leave everything to that destitute girl. Not, as she had thought, to a random name in the telephone directory.” The woman believes that Hannah “was full of good will.” The story confirms that, “The girl had a will. Enormous will and determination. She wanted the destruction of that woman who was good to her.” The story takes these clashes and contradictions and makes them into the beginnings of a philosophy, leaving high-minded questions, terror, and no answers.

This is how it goes for the stories of I am the Brother of XX. They are dark and mean, shift between cold and fiery. It’s not that the tones vary wildly, its that Jaeggy and Alhadeff moves them in ways both subtle and sudden, leaving you ever uncertain, and compelled to return, to find the clarity by dwelling in the cracks and discovering what exists there.

by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated from the French (Québec) by Rhonda Mullins (Canada, Coach House Books)

Every afternoon, Marcel works with his uncle at the butcher’s.

His hands in the red flesh, he strikes blows with the knife, cutting at just the right place, slashing what was formerly alive to give it a new shape, one of his own making. He doesn’t overthink it and moves instinctively.

It’s hard not to see the parallels with the author’s own creative process as she imposes her will on this fictionalized account of her grandmother’s life. Suzanne was the maternal grandmother she barely knew. The first time she saw her, she was one hour old. The second time, she was ten. And the third and final time came when she was 26 and Suzanne wouldn’t say why she left. Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to piece together her life, to tremendous literary effect.

“Now, there is her, there is you, and between you, there is me,” the narrator writes, asking, “How could you just walk away? How did you not perish at the thought of missing her nursery rhymes, her little-girl lies, her loose teeth, her spelling mistakes, her laces tied all by herself, then her crushes, her nails painted then bitten, her first rum-and-Cokes?”

The prose is careful and weighted, delightful. It sparks into life on page 15:

You had to die for me to take an interest in you.

For you to turn from a ghost to a woman. I don’t love you yet.

But wait for me. I’m coming.

It seems reductive, it seems too obvious to mention, but Suzanne is on the BTBA longlist because it’s beautifully written.

It begins in working-class Ottawa in the 1930s, the men “coming home from the factory with heavy hands and empty stomachs.” It’s cold and people are hungry in their hand-me-down shoes. We see the country’s first slums, there is no gas left for the cars, English mixes with French on the streets. Soon, Canada is at war, but people aren’t scared yet. Family stories share paragraphs with world history as the author invents conversations, everyday events, tics, and details to paint her portrait.

The language is nothing short of gorgeous, the turns of phrase and images memorable as Mullins’ steady hand ensures they all work equally well in English, served by an elevated register of French that comes across as poetic and earnest and vivid in this context.

Suzanne is 18 and off to study in Montreal. Talk turns to “systems of thought and worlds to invent.” There’s provincial and Canadian history, too, a swirl of references to the Duplessis government, L’Action catholique newspaper, and the launch of the Refus global manifesto, context for which is provided in translator’s notes at the end. Banned books, Automatism, and dinner parties (“You have a life. You wear it like a thin disguise.”) file by, Suzanne a “tightrope walker on the wire of history” as she abandons her family, puts her kids up for adoption, and moves to rural Gaspé, to Brussels, to England, to Harlem as it goes up in flames, to Alabama and the Ku Klux Klan.

What on the face of it is no more than fictionalized biography (I have a very limited interest in other people’s lives) is held together by such beautiful writing and pacing that the whole thing just works. Much like Éric Plamondon’s 1984 series of fictionalized biographies of Johnny Weissmuller, Richard Brautigan, and Steve Jobs might in other hands have read like a procession of facts to be checked off, a late-night binge of Wikipedia articles, the fact and fiction is combined here with such artistry and precision that the reader cannot help but be impressed. This is prose to lose yourself in. Never complicated, it’s gentle like a love song, comforting and enveloping like a black and white film, full of tones and textures. These sentences can destroy us. Not for their simplicity, but for the powerful beauty within the simplicity:

You are falling and you don’t know when it will stop.

This deftness of touch made La femme qui fuit a very good book, a critical and popular success both in Québec and France. Now Rhonda Mullins’ sensitive translation makes it a worthy inclusion on the BTBA longlist.