16 stories about language and translation in honour of 'JEANNE'

"a clever, sexy, moving & playful novel about literary translation, control, language, & selfhood.” - Jen Calleja

On Thursday 5th June we're thrilled to welcome author and literary translator Arielle Burgdorf to the bookshop for an excavation of their exquisite, experimental novel Jeanne.

When Jean, a young translator of French and Russian, receives a mysterious commission, she leaps at the chance to escape her current life—and husband—and relocate to Montréal. Marriage has destroyed her sense of self, but work offers a way to rebuild it, as Jean slowly rediscovers her identity via a series of literary encounters (as well as lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll).

With nods to the Situationists and Oulipo, JEANNE is an experimental yet at the same time intensely readable novel about gender, alterity, and linguistic insecurity. Will translation always be seen as an act of betrayal? Or does one's willingness to speak through and with the other yield its own rewards?

Thinking about JEANNE, we couldn’t resist going in search of more writing, not IN translation but ABOUT it. The list we came up with features mostly novels, but also a few non-fic hybrids, a couple of individual short stories ("Story of Your Life" from Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang and "Averroes's Search" by Jorge Luis Borges, collected in The Aleph). In all of them , languages, their dynamics and power, are more than tools for telling a story - they are the story itself.