The Killing Ground (1982) by Mary Lee Settle

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Killing Ground (1982)

by Mary Lee Settle

Canona, West Virginia

West Virginia: 3/10

 Author Mary Lee Settle is an interesting lady- she won the National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie and she helped to found the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1980.  The Killing Ground is the last novel in her blend of historical and family based auto-fiction, The Beulah Quintet.  The five volumes traverse thousands of miles and hundreds of years, from the state sanctioned murder of religious dissenters in 17th century England, through the settling of this corner of West Virginia by white people, to the present of the mid 1970's, when the author stand-in returns home to her coal-mining family to unravel the mystery of what is called in the description of the book the "murder" of her brother, though FWIW what happens to her brother, who dies hitting his head on the metal toilet of the local lock up after getting sucker punched by a drunken hillbilly (and distant relative) is, at best, manslaughter, murder requiring intent. 

  I can't find any discussion of The Killing Ground as auto-fiction but it read that way to me.  An early chapter features the author character describing her previous Beulah Quintet works in front of an audience of locals, and the description she gives of rich kid boho life in the late 50's, early 60's sounds pretty familiar. 

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) by Breece D’J Pancake

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) 

by Breece D’J Pancake 

Milton, West Virginia

West Virginia: 2/10

   This is the only book by West Virginia author Breece D'J Pancake (he acquired the apostrophe when a copy editor at The Atlantic made a typographical error and he decided it looked cool that way), who killed himself (or maybe accidentally shot himself while he was drunk.)  He was 27 when he died, putting him in the literary annex to rock and roll's 27 club.  That kind of gives you an idea of the Breece Pancake vibe- bad boys and bad girls skulking around burned out derelict West Virginia river towns.  In one particularly vivid story, a river-rat-tugboat worker staying in a decrepit SRO for New Year's picks up an underage prostitute. beds her and then has to call the cops when he finds her with her wrists slit in an alley behind the only bar in town.  That is the scene, man.   Generally speaking I'm relieved to encounter any book in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America written by a male author who isn't a coastal elite or a professor of lit at a university in some random part of the United States and Pancake here fits the bill.   Dying before he could write a novel, that's the real tragedy here. 

Ply (2026) by Hernan Diaz

 Audiobook Review

Ply (2026)

by Hernan Diaz

   Hernan Diaz returns after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his last novel, Trust (2022). I read Trust in the because it made the Booker prize Longlist.  At the time I said, "I quite enjoyed Trust, though I'm not sure it's a (booker prize) short lister- it might be a National Book Award and/or Pulitzer Nominee- vibe-wise Trust reminds me of Richard Powers- a recent winner and author of a book- Gain, that really reminds me of Trust, in that it attempts to convey an economic narrative in a novel."

  Thus, when I read the negative review in the New York Times calling Ply a dud and specifically calling out his Ballardian cyberpunk future as Dead on Arrival, I wasn't particularly dissuaded.  I got a bump to the top of the Libby borrowing list and blazed through my seven-day rental window at 2.25 speed- faster than I prefer but fine for Ply, which, at 15 hours isn't shockingly long but IS at times tedious.  I largely agree with the New York Times review of Dwight Garner.  Ply, like Trust, again stuck me as resembling the technique of Richard Powers- introducing subject matter from science (here it is physics) and melding that with elements of both genre and literary fiction.  Garner critiques the lack of specificity in Diaz's description of this dystopian future but I think that was a very specific choice by Diaz to keep from alienating his potential audience, he wanted something familiar enough to a literary fiction audience to not be off-putting. 

  I thought the most interesting facet of Ply, and something Garner didn't mention in his review, is the depiction of social life within the dystopian future.  Diaz goes further in describing this part of his world than any other dystopian/literary fiction cross-over that I can remember.   The human relationship at the center of Ply, between a girl electricity thief called "the pincher" and a kooky mad scientist who needs her help, was interesting, to me.  Overall, though, yeah, hard to see an Audience responding to Ply. 

  An independent critical observation I want to lay out in brief is that Diaz depicts a world where living beyond 40 or 50 is unusual.  This appears to be based on a fundamental misapprehension about human demography before modern medicine lowered infant mortality from almost half to essentially zero.   This often takes the form of depicting these times as being almost devoid of old people and having characters muse on how few people live beyond their mid 30's or 40's.  That is not how shit worked.  The fact is that if someone lived beyond year 5, they had a reasonable chance of living to a "normal" old age- 60 or 70, and that there were plenty of old people around back in the day. 

  Not an issue that would bother me normally, but Diaz does include pages and pages of his mad scientist character discussing particle physics, and his mad scientist character is the only human over 50 in the book, and Diaz' Pincher constantly talks about how, as a 20 something, she only has a few more years left before she can expect to die.

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026) by Ken Liu

 Audiobook Review

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories (2026)

by Ken Liu

   I'm a Ken Liu fan, if only because my guy doesn't respect high/low genre boundaries and he is committed to putting out work. I'm firmly ANTI the romantic ideal of the artist/visionary who can only produce under the influence of inspiration.  I'd rather take someone who puts out new product on a regular basis, even if that means working in areas that are more product than art.  I also like that Liu, unlike many writers of literary fiction has actually done something in his life besides write and teach. It's a subject that is rarely addressed in the world of literary fiction but screams out every week from the pages of the New York Times Review- for most writers of literary fiction, their biggest real-life achievement is either getting a full-time teaching position or a graduate degree... in creative writing.

  Specifically, I like this work in the field of "hard" science fiction. Regrettably, this collection sees him dabbling in genres like magical realism (the title story) and steampunk.  Part of the issue with this part of Liu's bibliography is that I never read his four-volume set, The Dandelion Dynasty- I just can't with the world-building fantasy. Like any collection of genre short fiction, there are hits and misses.  I thought the best stories in here were the two that had a cosmic point of view.  There is no theme more interesting to me in the realm of hard science fiction as the nature of time. Timekeeper's Symphony- which is just about time with no plot or characters, and Cosmic Spring, about a sentient spaceship living through the end of the universe, were the stand-out stories for me. 

The Hawkline Monster (1974) by Richard Brautigan

 Audiobook Review

The Hawkline Monster (1974)

by Richard Brautigan

       Richard Brautigan's literary career is a real rags-to-riches-to-drinking yourself to death 20th century tale.  Brautigan started out as a Bay Area poet publishing at the end of the 1950's to little critical or commercial acclaim. He struck mass-market and critical success at the exact same time with his back-to-back novels, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar in 1967 and 1968.  Brautigan was well positioned to capitalize on the aftermath of the summer of love with an already established publishing history (and publisher).  Unfortunately, the zeitgeist moved on and Brautigan, like many of the artists who achieved popular success in the 60's and post-60's era, faced questions of authenticity and relevance, and his commercial success guaranteed that critics would abound.  His two hits set him up, but he never stopped publishing.

   I heard about The Hawkline Monster from a random Instagram account which featured a slide show of alt-westerns.  I was intrigued, and became more intrigued when I saw that someone had made an Audiobook for this 1974 novel for the first time in 2016.  Anyway, I listened to the Audiobook via the Libby library app and I liked that the whole run time was four hours (216 pages long in print).  Listening to the Audiobook, it seemed like maybe history (and certainly contemporary critics) had been a little cruel to Brautigan- I went and read the New York Times review for the print edition and it was kill yourself awful.   I can see a real direct connection between the tail end of the hippy period- which was dismissed, as this novel was dismissed, as silly and inconsequential, and some of the thematic preoccupations of postmodernist, who were already well underway in the mid 1970's. 

  There seems to be a parallel to the way that disco music was written out of the history of electronic music because it wasn't cool, even though it was undoubtedly electronic music. 

Clay's Quilt (2001) by Silas House

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Clay's Quilt (2001)

by Silas House

Free Creek, Kentucky

Kentucky: 14/16

  I actually heard about Silas House before I started reading Clay's Quilt- from my girlfriend who keeps in touch with the Tyler Childers led contemporary music scene- House directed a recent Grammy nominated video of a song by Childers I think Silas House was made the official poet of Kentucky or something like that which is cool because he is LGBT and Kentucky is... Kentucky.  I'd actually have to say that Kentucky seems to me, on the basis of the books from this chapter, maybe the most intellectually interesting place on the map since I left New York.  

   

   Clay's Quilt was House's first novel.   Since then, he's kept up an impressive resume both as an academic, where he is a teacher at Berea College, author (five novels and an equal number of collections of poetry) and public intellectual.   He's won some regional prizes but hasn't really broken out nationally, which I guess is why I hadn't known about him.  He's a good example of why the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project makes sense, introducing the reader to authors they may have missed. 

  Clay's Quilt is about Clay, an orphan child of a West Virginia mountain woman who is murdered by her vengeful ex when Clay is an infant.  I expected the quilt to play a bigger role given the name of the book, but it doesn't really work out that way.  Nor, for that matter, is Clay's Quilt about LGBT issues. Rather, it tells the story of Clay, a happy-go-lucky coal miner, who meets and marries a woman who plays a mean fiddle and has a nasty ex-husband.  

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010) by Glenn Taylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Marrowbone Marble Company (2010)

by Glenn Taylor

Huntington, West Virginia

West Virginia: 1/10

    Of all the state thus far in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, West Virginia is a tie for last place in terms of my personal encounters with the state (Alongside Delaware (train ride through only), North Carolina (drove through only), South Carolina (no contact), Alabama (no contact), Kentucky (no contact) and Florida (flight lay over only).  The closest I've ever come was in college, when some friends of mine went to a college football game in West Virginia (driving from Washington DC.) They described a wild time, but it sounded like a pretty standard "big game" in a college town atmosphere to my college self. 

    These days, the only thing West Viriginia is likely to evoke in the national psyche is the lyric from the John Denver song, coal mining and opiate addiction.  Culturally, I'm expecting lots of continuity with the Kentucky chapter and The Marrowbone Marble Company seemed like a book that could have just as easily been set in Kentucky as it was in West Virginia.   I enjoyed the ambition of this book and author Glenn Taylor, about a man who comes back from World War II with questions about the unspoken rules of West Virginia life.  He marries the spinster-adjascent daughter of the owner of the glass factory where he works (Taylor uses the phrase "glass man" about a million times in the 300 pages of this book), reconciles with his long-lost hillbilly relatives who resides in a holler, and goes about building a marble factory.  I'm talking children's marbles here- which is something I didn't fully grasp until I was actually reading the book- I thought it was going to be some kind of quarry operation.

  Conflict comes from the judgments of "outsiders" who dislike the racially mixed, communal aspects of the protagonists' vision. There is also support, and Taylor does a good job situating the action in the national tide of integrationist activity in the1960's.   Certainly, The Marrobone Marble Company made a welcome respite from the standard sad, realist -girl/woman fare centered of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.

Wolf Worm (2026) by T. Kingfisher

 Audiobook Review

Wolf Worm (2026)

by T. Kingfisher

  The 1,001 Novels: A Library of America has me thinking a lot about regional American literature and fiction.   And about genre, and the relationship of genre fiction to literature, the border between those two subjects, and the relationship between that border and the geography/location/psychogeography of books. Clearly, the more specific the place of a work, the more likely that will move away from the world of genre fiction and towards the world of literature.  The presence of place-based details in a plot is a characteristic of literary fiction and less important in genre fiction, where the plot itself always assumes primacy.

  I was thinking about those things as I listened to the Audiobook of Wolf Worm, a work of regional horror (North Carolina woods) set in 1899.   Author T. Kingfisher is a pseudonym for children's author (and webcomic creator) Ursula Vernon.  I can see where she wouldn't want her diehard fans picking up this book, about parasites and the people who study parasites, being picked up by a 13-year-old fan because...yikes.  

  I found Wolf Worm pretty slow through the first two Acts- it's basically a straight up work of historical fiction about a young woman who agrees to be an illustrator for a reclusive entomologist who studies bugs with an emphasis on parasites in the woods of North Carolina.   Things get weird in the third act when the protagonist finds a hidden shed on the property, and of course, she can't leave well enough alone.

Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) by Bobbie Ann Mason

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)

by Bobbie Ann Mason

Kentucky Lake, Kentucky

Kentucky: 13/16

  Another short story collection from the 1,001 Novels project that left me with nothing but vague impressions.  It didn't help that I read this title off the Kindle App on my phone.  Mason seems squarely from the "everyday life among the losers" school of American lit, but this collection was published in 1982, so she was at the leading edge of that movement.  This book is also mapped at the far western edge of Kentucky- a location closer to southern Illinois and western Missouri than the rest of Kentucky.  

Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson

 Audiobook Review

Anathem (2008)

by Neal Stephenson

    I love me a 30 hour plus long Audiobook version of a Neal Stephenson novel.  Stephenson is the epitome of an author I want to read, but not necessarily deal with the bulky, physical book itself NOR the equally lengthy E-book edition.  The physical version is 937 pages plus another 17 pages of foreword. 954 pages!  Once a physical book goes over 600 pages it becomes an actual, physical burden to read so if I can avoid that experience I will.  It took me months and months to make it through this Audiobook, mainly because the first two thirds of the book is almost unbelievably boring, just hours and hours of low-tech monks on some kind of earth like planet using a language that Stephenson concocted himself.  As the title of the book might suggest, Stephenson's made-up language mostly sounds like an iteration of Latin which makes sense because the protagonist is a member of this alt-Earth monastic order that lives apart from the secular world.

   The plot is slow- so slow- to develop but eventually a spaceship shows up around Arbre and the "mathic orders" and secular authority compete and combine to figure out WTH is going on.  Only the third act, with a roughly improvised trip to space and engagement with the aliens on their spaceship, really meets any criterion for "exciting" and I can def see why there has never been a film or tv version of this book but the last few hours of action made me glad I had suffered through the rest of the Audiobook.

   

Filth Eaters (2026) by Ito Romo

 Book Review

Filth Eaters (2026)

by Ito Romo

  I've been getting more book recommendations from social media recently.  I found out about Filth Eaters from the Instagram account of the publisher; Deep Vellum Press out of Texas.  The social media post promised a vampire yard with an Aztec twist, which sounds great to me.  I'm interested in any work of fiction that takes a stab at pre-Columbian characters, a group largely absent from historical fiction as a genre.  This slim volume flips back and forth between a dystopian near-present where a vampire scion uses drones to post his kills to an adoring.world-wide audience in a flooded New York and the post-conquest Mexico where an old world, Spanish vampire emigrates to the new world and meets his new world counterparts, who have survived the fall of their Aztec partners and arrival of the Vampire-hating Spanish, but only barely.  Like many Vampire narrative, both the plot and the characters suffer from ennui.  The life of a vampire, super powerful but limited in their range of activity, seems exhausting, so it is no wonder vampire characters are so often exhausted. 

 I enjoyed the scenes set in the past, but the dystopian New York material felt uninspired.

The Invincible (1964) by Stanislaw Lev

 Audiobook Review

The Invincible (1964) 

by Stanislaw Lev

  This 1964 work by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lev got an Ebook editions last year and after a year of checking it out of the Libby library Audiobook app and returning it unlistened-to I finally finished it.  I've found myself drawn to science fiction, particularly "hard" science fiction ever since I started the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, as a counterweight to the poverty/geography bound realism that editor Susan Straight favors.  I'm sure the Audiobook happened in 2025 because The Invincible was one of the first books to deal with ideas like microrobots and swarm intelligence.

  It's a straight forward set up, space ship arrives at a distant planet to figure out what happened to the last space ship and discovers a planet seemingly devoid of all life...or is it. 

Kentucky Straight (1992) by Chris Offutt

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Kentucky Straight (1992)

by Chris Offutt

Kentucky: 12/16

  At this point in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, any book that isn't a story about a sad woman, teen girl or girl child is a win.  This collection of short stories, filled with hillbillies doing dumb shit, is a breath of fresh air within the 1,001 Novels project.  Most of the protagonists (all?) are men at the margins of society, struggling with the daily humiliations visited upon them by everyday life. 

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (2023) by Hu Anyan

 Book Review

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (2023)

by Hu Anyan

Translated by Jack Hargreaves

    Years of Chinese lessons on Duolingo have brought me no closer to my goal of someday speaking Chinese, but it is an interesting hobby and certainly a better way to spend my screen time than watching TikTok's about buying giant industrial machines from Asia.   It has certainly given me a great deal of respect both for native speakers of the language and Chinese speakers who have learned English.  The major issue with Chinese is that there is no alphabet and no letters, only thousands and thousands of characters.  Each character represents a syllable, so in that sense, Chinese is easier than Western languages.  Assuming you know the character and the corresponding sound there is little that can go wrong.  Getting to that point is the hard part.

  As translator Jack Hargreaves explains in his introduction, translating Chinese prose into English presents complexities in that the literal translation of Chinese characters into English words inevitably dulls the poetics in a way that translating from one Western language to another simply does not.  On the other hand, the contemporary China depicted in I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is so close to life in a city like New York, Toronto or Chicago that potential confusions are mitigated. 

   The title is a little misleading in that the Author/protagonist's stint delivering packages in Beijing is one chapter in a longer narrative about a rootless young man struggling to find his place in contemporary China.   As the book progresses, the reader learns that the narrator has some familiarity with the western literary tradition and a desire to evoke some of the artistic traditions of the west- specifically the Kuntslerroman.   Perhaps it has something to do with my prejudice and ignorance of Chinese culture that I would expect the author to actually be what the title claims he is.

  

Trampoline (2015) by Robert Gipe

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Trampoline (2015)

by Robert Gipe

Cumberland Mountains, Kentucky

Kentucky: 11/16

   Another day, another coming of age novel about a teen girl growing up in difficult circumstances in an underprivileged American community.   One theme I've noticed about character in novels set in the rural south is the almost utter absence of any desire to escape one's surroundings.  Most likely that comes from the difficult/oppositional relationship many of these characters have towards formal education, even the smart ones.  The idea that a young, smart character living in rural poverty might reject advancement through education in favor of wallowing in the human misery of their surroundings is a strange one to me.  Before the 1,001 Novels I thought the idea of using formal education as a means of escape was essentially universal in the United States, but such is not the case.  It's not the case thus far in Kentucky, and it mostly was not the case in the deep south: Mississippi and Alabama in particular.

   Here, our teenage protagonist shuttles between her addiction adjacent mother and environmental activity grandmother who is focused on defeating the permit of a mining company to "de-top" a nearby mountain, a controversial stance considering the number of people who are employed by said mining company in the local community.  Gipe does a good job capturing the tumultuous inner life of an adolescent girl, but seriously are there any other types of adolescent girl in ya lit?

Every Bone a Prayer (2020) by Ashley Blooms

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Every Bone a Prayer (2020)

 by Ashley Blooms

Cutshin, Kentucky

Kentucky: 10/16

    I think Kentucky will prove to be my favorite state in this chapter.  It's either going to be Kentucky or Tennessee (It will NOT be Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arkansas or Missouri).  I was heartened when the jacket copy indicated that Every Bone a Prayer was a work of speculative fiction- a genre that is pretty much completely absent from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  I can only surmise that it has to do with the tastes of editor Susan Straight, who clearly sees this project as an opportunity to the tell the stories of impoverished and neglected women and girls as the priority in her selections. 

  Thus, the speculative fiction still involves a main character who is helpless and abused and spends the entire book in this one holler in Kentucky.  She also talks to crawdads, witnesses life size glass sculptures of people sprout the front yard of near by trailer and slips out of her skin and walks around a skeleton at night.  Other than as a metaphor for the disassociation felt by victims of childhood sexual abuse, I wasn't sure what to make of any of it.

The Breakup (2026) by Kurt Andersen

Book Review

The Breakup (2026)

by Kurt Andersen

  I've been a fan of Kurt Andersen since his Spy magazine days.  For those of you who don't know, Spy Magazine was a hugely influential title that lasted from the mid 1980's to the late 1990's.  It was known for its tone, generally called "snarky," which proved hugely influential in the early days of the internet, specifically when it came to Gossip-Culture websites like Gawker (RIP). I also enjoyed Turn of the Century, his last attempt at a zeitgeist-y style of literary fiction.  The fact that Turn of the Century was published in 1999 should tell you that he hasn't exactly been working to perfect his approach, with his recent works including a co-write with murderer Alec Baldwin about our unhinged Commander-in-Chief. 

  The Breakup, on the other hand, got me excited based on the review in the New York Times book section.  Truth be told I'm a sucker for anything that combines post-apocalypitc/dystopian themes with any other literary fiction adjacent drama.  Here, the dystopia is a very well imagined Civil War 2 which has resulted in a bifurcation as imagined for the micro-targeting era, with cities functioning as "blue" enclaves in post-split "red" states and red portions of blue states splitting to start new states, etc.   The story is about as minimal as it gets: Jewish tech-bro executive and his red-state, Cuban immigrant, poetess wife breaking up and making up as they tour their non-gender conforming daughter across the post-split landscape.

 I fully agree with the New Times write-up: that the pleasure here is in the richly imagined details rather than any satisfaction with the loosely woven plot.   I devoured The Breakup over a vacation weekend on my Kindle and barely wanted to stop reading for any reason other than meals.

  To me, the most trenchant theme was one that was largely (though not wholly) unexplored: That the blue parts of the map would be more than happy to be shed of the red parts, or at least those red parts that feel so strongly about the issue.  In The Breakup, the capital of the post-split red state is Abilene Texas, the largest metro area remaining in red America.  The last current event type thing that happens in the book is a "recission" where the state of Montana realizes that they are going to be on the hook for paying a bunch of literal poor, white, trash and vote to go back to the United States (after voting to leave.)  In that way, The Breakup ultimately imagines Civil War 2 as a kind of post break-up revenge fantasy.

The Memory Seekers Daughter (2005) by Kim Edwards

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Memory Seekers Daughter (2005) 

by Kim Edwards
Lexington, Kentucky

Kentucky: 9/16

   The Memory Keeper's Daughter is about a physician father who gives up his Down's Syndrome afflicted daughter at birth, asking a trusted nurse to deposit her at a nearby institution (as was often the practice back then).  He tells his young wife that the daughter- the twin of a healthy baby boy, is dead and this lie becomes a sin that the couple can absolutely not surpass.  Of course, I knew on a variety of levels that once this Dad gave away his daughter with Down's Syndrome, everyone would spend the rest of their lives thinking about little else.  The new mother, of course, dedicates her entire life to fighting for this child.  The father is never really able to connect with his son or wife.  The actual mother never, ever, for one single day stops thinking about her dead daughter.  And we are talking 500 pages of this.

  The Doctor's wife, at least, has a little Betty Draperish vibe that entertains.  The Doctor himself is sad. 

As for the woman who raises this child as her own... I myself was the older sibling of a similar brother, someone who was not given away.  I've spent a lot of time living the experience that this woman went through, albeit not as a single mother in 1980's Pittsburgh.  I was interested to see how author Edwards resolve the question that I have (and still have not gotten an answer for):  Of course, it is great that parents devote their entire lives to raising special needs children instead of having them institutionalized.  But what about the fact that all this work is performed under the guide of someday generating an independent human being who can, in fact, exist without 24/7/365 support which is provided by these parents.  My personal experience is that this idea of adult independence for special needs folks is a bit of a sham.

 Of course, The Memory Seekers Daughter ends just when we might expect to see how everything works out, but who can blame the author.  She doesn't have an answer, no one does. 

Schoolgirl (1939) by Osamu Dazai

Book Review

Schoolgirl (1939)

by Osamu Dazai

Translation from Japanese 

Allison Markin 2011

  Japanese fiction is interesting because it combines a centuries long tradition of native fiction- mostly literature of the court type stuff with mostly twentieth century developments in Western literature, with many published authors coming from a background in western literary studies.   The limit on absorption of these authors by western readers has been a lack of translation and the general lack of interest of English-speaking readers in non-English fiction, but times have been changing.  These days, there are well respected yearly literary awards on both sides of the Atlantic for best translated fiction into English.  Personally, I believe both the E-book and Audiobook format have opened some doors for translated fiction as publishers refine their ideas of what and how they can sell books not written originally in English. 

  I thought Schoolgirl was interesting because it is a kind of proto-existentialist text written from the POV of a young woman at a time (the 1930's) when the idea of a "youth culture" was still emerging in the west. This makes Dazai a trailblazer in this regard, and it is interesting that the English translation I read didn't even happen until 2011. It's a brief read and well worth the time for anyone interested in pre-World War II literature from whatever part of the globe

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek(2019) by Kim Michele Richardson

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (2019) 

by Kim Michele Richardson

Sigman Road, Troublesome Creek, Kentucky

Kentucky: 8/16

   During the Work Projects Administration, the Federal Government paid women to schlep library books into the hollows of Kentucky.  Also, in Kentucky there was a family of "Blue People"- the Fugates, who due the chance marriage of a French immigrant to a local girl, inherited a recessive genetic trait that caused their skin to turn blue from a lack of oxygen in the blood.  The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek combines these two true stories into a single novel about a woman- called Bluet, who is the last, blue-skinned woman of her kind, and works for the WPA as a book woman.   Truly, author Kim Michele Richardson stuck some kind of thematic alchemy with her combination of the two subjects, making The Book Woman uncommonly affecting for a book of this type. 

  Most notably was her classification as a "colored' person alongside the only African American woman in the valley.  This part of the book seemed a little far-fetched, since I've made through the entire deep south with many not black but not white characters and it seems like a blue skinned woman of EUROPEAN ancestry would not be classified as "colored."  To me, that sounds more like a definition you would have come across in the urban north, where groups like the Irish and Italians were commonly discriminated against and referred to as non-white, in spite of their European ancestry.