SUGGESTED FICTION IN TRANSLATION

Jorge Amado, Tent of Miracles: A Novel, translated from the Portuguese by Barbara Shelby Merello, with an introduction by Ilan Stavens (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1991, 2003).

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms, prologue by Jorge Luis Borges, introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine, and illustrated by Norah Borges de Torre (New York; New York Review Books, , 1964, 2003).

Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, Where Tigers Are at Home, translated from the French by Mike Mitchell (New York: Other Press, 2008, 2011).

Max Blecher, Adventures in Immediate Irreality, translated from the Romanian by Michael Henry Heim, , preface by Andrei Codrescu, introduction by Herta Muller (New York: New Directions Books, 2015).

Roberto Bolano, A Little Lumpen Novelita, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, New York: New Directions Books, 2014).

Emmanuel Bove, Henri Duchemin and His Shadows, translated from the French by Alyson Waters, introduction by Donald Breckenridge (New York: New York Review Books, 2015).

Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation: A Novel, translated from the French John Cullen ((New York: Other Press, 2015) (See Laila Lalami, "Scene of the Crime," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/14/2015.).

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child (Book Four, The Neapolitan Novels: Maturity, Old Age), translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2015) .

Dario Fo, The Pope's Daughter: A Novel of Lucrezia Borgia, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar (New York: Europa Editions, 2015) .

Gunter Grass, The Meeting at Telgte, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim, with an afterword by Leonard Forster (New York: A Harvest Book/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt, 1979, 1981).

Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance: A Novel, translated from the French by Linda Asher (New York: Harper, 2013, 2015).

Par Lagerkvist, Barabbas, translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair, with a preface by Lucien Maury and a letter by Andre Gide (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1951, 1989).

Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, introduction by Benjamin Moser, edited by Benjamin Moser (New York: New Directions Books, 2015) (See Terrence Rafferty, "The Stories She Told," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/2/2015.).

Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk, translated from the Turkish by Edouard Roditi, with a new introduction by the author (New York: New York Review Books, 1961, 2005).

Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball: Two Novels, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen (New York: Knopf, 2015) (See Steve Erickson, "What Set Him Spinning," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/16/2015.).

Sofi Oksanen, Purge: A Novel, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (New York: Black Cat, 2008, 2010).

Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared: A Novel, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (New York: Knopf, 2015).

Per Petterson, I Refuse: A Novel, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Minneapolis, Mn: Graywolf Press, 2015).

Moss Roberts, trans. & ed., Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies, with assistance of C. N. Tay, preface by Yiyun Li, illustrated by Victo Ngai (London: The Folio Society, 2014).

Carlos Rojas, The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press/The Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, 2013).

Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book, translated from the Chinese by Meredith McKinney (London: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 2006).

Bernhard Schlink, Homecoming: A Novel, translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim (New Yorzk: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 2009).

Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century, translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Richard Greeman (New York: New York Review Books, 1981, 2015).

Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World, translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane, illustrated by Ben Cain (London: The Folio Society, 2012).

Timur Vermes, Look Who's Back, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch (New York & London: MacLehose Press/Quercus, 2012, 2015).

Christa Wolf, City of Angels, or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud: A Novel, translated from the German by Damion Searls (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, 2013) ("I have know for a long time that the real transgressions are the ones that happen on the inside, not out in the open. And that you can deny these secret transgressions to yourself for a very long time, and hide them, and never speak about them out loud. We cling tight to this innermost secret and keno it and keep it." Id. at 309.).

Christa Wolf, They Divided the Sky: A Novel, translated from the German by Luise von Flotow  (Ottawa: U. of Ottawa Press, 2013.).

MO YAN'S PERSPECTIVE(S) ON CHINA

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), Big Breasts and Wide Hips: A Novel, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996, 2012) (From the backcover: "In a country where men dominate, this epic novel is first and foremost about women, As the title implies, the female body serves as the book's most important image and metaphor. The protagonist, Mother, is born in 1900. Married at seventeen into the Shangguam family, she has nine children, none by her husband, who is sterile. The youngest is her only boy, the narrator of the book, a spoiled and ineffectual child who stands in stark contrast to his headstrong and forceful sisters. Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman, constantly risking her life to save the lives of several of her children and grandchildren as the political tides shift dramatically from year to year. [] Each of the seven chapters recounts a different era, from the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 through the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the early years of Sun Yat Sen's Republic, the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao years. This stunning novel, peopled with dozens of unforgettable characters, is a searing, uncompromising vision of twentieth-century China, as seen through the eyes of China's preeminent . . . novelist.").

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), Frog: A Novel, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (New York: Viking, 2014).

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), The Garlic Ballads: A Novel, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (New York: Penguin Books, 1995, 2013).

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), Red Sorghum: A Novel, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), Pow!, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012) (See Ian Buruma, "Folk Opera," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/3/2013.).

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), Red Sorghum: A Novel, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (New York: Penguin Books, 1993) (Under normal circumstances, it is the power of morality that keeps the beast in us hidden beneath a pretty exterior. A stable, peaceful society is the training ground for humanity, just as caged animals, removed from the violent unpredictability of the wild, are influenced by the behavior of their captors in time." Id. at 323.).

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), The Republic of Wine: A Novel, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (New York: Arcade Publishing,  1992, 2012).

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series), translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013).

Mo Yan (aka Guan Moye), Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001, 2011).

REFLECTIONS ON CHINA

Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China's Predicament (New York & London: Norton, 1992).

Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (New York: Farar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

Wang Hui, China from Empire to Nation-State, translated from the Chinese by Michael Gibbs Hill (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014).

Wang Hui, China's New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, edited by Theodore Huters, translated from the Chinese by Theodore Huters & Rebecca Karl (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2003).

Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limit of Modernity  (London & New York: Verso, 2009).

BEYOND COMPASSION

Larissa MacFarguhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling With Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) ("The usual way to do good is to help those who are near you: a person grows up in a particular place, perceives that something is wrong there, and sets out to fix it. Or a person's job suddenly requires heroism of him and he rises to the occasion . . .  Either way, he is taking care of his own, trying to make their lives better--lives that he understands because they are like his. He may not know personally the people he's helping, but he has something in common with them--they are, in some sense, his people. There's an organic connection between him and his work." "Then there's another sort of person, who starts out with something more abstract--a sense of injustice in the world at large, and a longing for goodness as such. This person want to live a just life, feels obligated to right wrongs or relieve suffering, but he doesn't know right away how to do that, so he sets himself to figuring it out. He doesn't feel that he must attend first to people close to him; he is moved not by  sense of belonging but by the urge to do as much good s he can. There is no organic, necessary connection between him and his work--it doesn't choose him, he chose it. The do-gooders I'm talking about are this second sort of person. They're not better or worse than the first sort, but they are rarer and  harder to understand. It can seem unnatural to look away from one's own people toward a moral idea, but for these do-gooders it;s not: it's natural for them." "The do-gooder . . . knows that there are crises everywhere, all the time, and he seeks them out. He is not spontaneous--he plans his good deeds in cold blood. He may be compassionate, but compassion is not why he does what he does--he committed himself to helping before he saw the person who needs him. He has no ordinary life: his good deeds are his life. This make him good; but it can also make him seem perverse--a foul-weather friend, a kind of virtuous ambulance chaser. And it's also why do-gooders are a reproach: you know, as the do-gooder knows, that there is always, somewhere, a need for help." Id. at 4-5.).

SOMETHING TO CONSIDER WHEN NEXT YOUR HEAR ABOUT EXPORTING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY ABROAD

Ari Berman, Gives Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) ("The fight over the right to vote sharply intensified after Barack Obama's election, the pinnacle of the VRA's success.[] After Obama's victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states form 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party's triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country,nearly all of them under Republican control--from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania--passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resemble the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters." Id. at 10. "To Justice Antonin Scalia, the overwhelming congressional support for the VRA [Voting Rights Act], most recently in 2006, when Congress reauthorized the act for another twenty-five years by a vote of 390-33 in the House and 9-0 in the Senate, was proof of its unconstitutionality. 'Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act,' he said facetiously. 'Who is going to vote against that in the future?' The hushed courtroom gasped audibly when Scalia attributed support for the law to 'a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.'" Id. at 8. "The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice." Lyndon Banes Johnson, August 6, 1965. If one is a small "d" democratic--that is, you truly believe in the democratic process--, then this and Citizens United should be of grave concern to you.).

THE MYTHS OF AMERICAN ANGLO-SAXONISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1981) (Perhaps, despite all their individual and collective flaws, the Founders had a more idealistic and universal notion of equality (as in  the self-evident truth that ''all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights') than the following generations, including twenty-first-century Americans. "The flowering of the new science of man in the first half of the nineteenth century was ultimately decisive in giving a racial cast to Anglo-Saxonism. Scientists, by mid-century, had provided an abundance of 'proofs' by which English and American Anglo-Saxons could explain their power, progress, governmental stability, and freedom. Rather than the eighteenth-century emphasis on the human race, its problems, and its progress, there was in the following century a feverish interest in distinctly endowed human races--races with innately unequal abilities, which could lead either to success and world power or to total subordination and extinction. In western Europe and America the Caucasian race became generally recognized as the race clearly superior to all others; the Germanic was recognized as the most talented branch of the Caucasians; and the Anglo-Saxons, in England and the United States, and often even in Germany, were recognized as the most gifted descendants of the Germans. The scientific study of man provided supposedly empirical proofs for the assertions of propagandists and patriots." Id. at 43-44. "By the middle years of the nineteenth century the simple praise of Anglo-Saxon institutions and freedom, which had assumed such importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had undergone a profound change in England. Rather than emphasizing earlier freedom as a basis for internal reform, the new theorists were envisaging a world shaped to the desires of a supposedly innately superior Anglo-Saxon race. There was a firm and increasing belief that what was good for the Anglo-Saxons was good for the world. In Germany in the early nineteenth century ideas of historic Teutonic greatness were used most frequently to strengthen demands for nationhood. But the English were attracted to the idea of their race as a regenerating force for the whole world, for in Great Britain, throughout her colonies, and in the United States the Anglo-Saxons were apparently completing that march begun in the dawn of history by Aryan tribesmen. It was this aspect of the new Teutonism that also found most fertile ground on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States. There, ideas and dreams indigenous to American history melded with a variety of themes from Europe to transform Revolutionary ideals for human progress into an ideology of continental, hemispheric, and even world racial destiny for a particular chosen people." Id. at 77. "Though the early years of the nineteenth century both religion and science confirmed Americans in the view that mankind consisted of one human species, that the obvious physical differences were the result of environment, and that the vast differences in the human condition and accomplishments stemmed form the same cause. This view was to change radically in western European and transatlantic thought, but the change also came about because of the peculiarities of the American experience. New racial ideas which influenced the whole of Western society in the first half of the nineteenth century fell on especially fertile ground in the United States. Ideas flowed both ways across the Atlantic in the formative years of he new ethnology. The American experience and American conclusions drawn from this experience helped to shape western European attitudes. Racial differences were dramatized in the United States, for white, black and red were thrust together from the earliest settlements. While blacks, of course, were central to the general development of American thought on race, Indians were of particular importance in the development of American racial thought in the context of an expanding and aggressive nation. In dealing with the Indians the United States began to formulate a rationale of expansion which was readily adaptable to the needs of an advance over other peoples and to a world role." Id. at 99-100. Two point, both of which should be obvious but for which Americans are in constant denial. First, notwithstanding "race" being a mere social construct, one cannot understand American history and American politics without appeal to race. For example, Slavery, Jim Crow, Indian Removal, Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico [Non] Statehood, Chinese Exclusion, Gentleman's Agreement with Japan, Eastern European Immigration Restrictions, Mexican Immigration (both legal and illegal), the whole "Model Minority" hype, and so on. Second, there is a significant racial component to American thought and rhetoric regarding the so-called War on Terror. For example, Syrian Refugees. For the most part, the Founders grounded in the Enlightenment. The later generations have steadily moved away from the Enlightenment and embraced the darkness of superstition, racialism, and religious bigotry. That we Americans are an enlightened people(s) is a myth, if not an outright lie. The myth of American Anglo-Saxism has grave consequences.).

INDIVIDUALISM

Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980) ("Constitutionalism and absolutism are labels for theories of the polity, alternative conceptions of the proper ordering and use of public power. They consider human beings as political entities, and deal with them only insofar as they have a place in the public realm. Individualism, in the form it took in French psychological and ethical theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dealt with human beings primarily as private persons, and was more a mood or temper than a theory. It found expression in a variety of ideals during those centuries, Although individualism could be associated with the solitary life of the scholar in retreat form the world, it was more often associated with a pleasurable life of like-minded men (and sometime women( who eschewed regular public involvement to concentrate their energies in philosophy leisured discussion, and good fellowship with one another. Individualism promoted the joy of private life, the fulfillment of each person, the vita contemplativa rather than the vita activa. It was compatible with a greater or lesser awareness of public duties that needed to be performed to make such a way of life possible for those capable of enjoying it, The primary hallmark of individualism, in all it variants, was the exploration and fulfillment of the self." Id. at 83. "The role of the scholar in this impressively articulated order is to assist his king in understanding and applying the principles of philosophy that are the indispensable grounding of all human activity, from the conduct of the self to the government of principalities. Le Caron asserts that a philosopher true to the love of knowledge will also be a 'lover of la chose publique, tending to no other good but common utility, not living a life contrary to that of vulgar men but a better one, and giving no occasion to trouble the political order.' He contrasts such a life with that of the avaricious or ambitious man, the two types that became so prevalent in the social philosophy of the seventeenth century. Of the two, Le Caron regards ambition as more noble, since it imitates philosophy in its attention to public affairs, instead of remaining, as avarice, must always be, caught up in the inferior world of things. But the man who desires glory for its own sake rather than loving the public good corrupts his behavior to please other men, and 'nothing is virtuous or vicious to him but what pleases or displeases his master.' Only la souveraine philosophie comprehends 'the essence and truth of things' and provides a worthy motivation for excellence in human life." Id. at 85-86 (citations omitted).).