I finished The Woman in the Purple Skirt wondering what was real. The more I thought about its point of view, the more I realized that uncertainty was exactly what kept me thinking.

I had read Sora Kim-Russell’s name many times without realizing how much of her work was already on my shelves. For Women in Translation Month, we talked about working with authors, the creative decisions behind translation, invisible care work, editing, and what translation has meant for her own writing.

A recommendation put The Specters of Algeria on my TBR. When it appeared again during Women in Translation Month, I took the hint. Hwang Yeo Jung’s novel starts small and gradually opens into something much stranger.

A smell beneath a Seoul department store leads to something built from women's suffering, blood, and rage. Yi Seoyoung's feminist body horror is grotesque, angry, and completely shameless.

She left home at sixteen with nothing but ambition. A factory floor by day, night school by evening, and a literary debut at twenty-two. Kyung-sook Shin writes about families the way families actually are, with all the love and all the cost of that love sitting right next to each other on the page.

This quiet, layered novel follows Riko as she learns to see love, duty, and self-worth through both her waking life and her dreams. Kawakami’s storytelling is slow and deliberate, revealing itself in subtle ways that linger long after the last page. Reading it while wandering through Tokyo made the line between past and present blur, much like Riko’s own journey toward understanding herself.

In Red Sword, Bora Chung trades surreal short fiction for a full-scale dystopian sci-fi epic. On a fog-shrouded battlefield, a slave-turned-reluctant fighter faces clones, color-coded factions, and truths that change everything she thought she knew.

Sayaka Murata flips family and intimacy inside out. Vanishing World is surreal, absurd, and deeply unsettling, with social commentary that feels uncomfortably close to real life. Spoiler-free thoughts on why it works and who it’s for.

A quiet, emotionally layered novel about love, missed connection, and the slow ache of wrong timing. Graceful and unresolved in all the right ways.

A soft, surreal novella about memory, care, and emotional quiet. Marigold Mind Laundry doesn’t ask you to understand — just to sit with it.