Belletrista Issue 4

This is an archived issue of Belletrista. If you are looking for the current issue, you can find it here

Belletrista - A site promoting translated women authored literature from around the world


Meet Italy's Award-winning author Lia Levi in this interview with Paola Sergi.	Fifteen years old and All Grown Up? Rachael Beale takes us on an Orange Prize retrospective journey.	In Praise of New Zealand's Patricia Grace

Welcome to our fourth issue, and a further excursion into the wonderful world of literature! This time we feature an interview with Italy's celebrated Lia Levi, and we also introduce the works of Patricia Grace from New Zealand, Assia Djebar from Algeria, and two new authors, Maaza Mengiste and Nadifa Mohamed, from East Africa. Our very own Rachael Beale talks to some of the women behind the British Orange Prize in a retrospective piece. And just in case you don't have enough to read, we present 22 reviews of books by authors representing 17 different countries. Finally, we've included more than 60 original and distinctive titles from around the globe in the New and Notable section, for your browsing pleasure. We have thoroughly enjoyed producing this issue for you, and hope that you'll relish it!

Reviews
Below is a small tantalizing selection of this month's reviews....

THE PASSPORT

Herta Müller

Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers

In this novella, Herta Müller paints a bleak picture of life in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania, a world where men drink their paychecks away, striking miners are sent to freeze at a mountaintop sanatorium, and women prostitute themselves to survive or escape.
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Reviewed by Simone Cornelisson

HEAVEN OF DRUMS

Ana Gloria Moya

Translated from the Spanish by W. Nick Hill

Heaven of Drums is an ambitious little book which uses an interracial love triangle to build a narrative history of the independence of the author's native Argentina.
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Reviewed by Andy Barnes

RIEN NE VA PLUS

Margarita Karapanou

Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich

Is there any word more ambiguous than "love", asks the much-loved Greek author, Margarita Karapanou. Three characters declare their undying love for the object of their affection and proceed to play out their passion in the most bizarre and, sometimes, disturbing ways.
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Reviewed by Akeela Gaibie-Dawood

BENEATH THE LION'S GAZE

Maaza Mengiste

This debut novel begins as Hailu, the patriarch of a successful family in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, operates on a young man who has sustained a bullet wound in his back that will paralyze him permanently. It is 1974, and Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia and the "King of Kings", is old, tired, and far removed from his country's numerous problems.
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Reviewed by Darryl Morris

WENCH

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

To enter the world of Wench is to imagine oneself dying of thirst while surrounded by water, or starving while everyone else eats their fill. Using an unusual setting, Perkins-Valdez's debut novel illustrates the painful temptation that confronts a slave in a world where freedom hangs like forbidden fruit on every tree.
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Reviewed by Kathleen Ambrogi