Author: Derek Warker

September marks National Translation Month, a time to celebrate international literature and the art and impact of translation in bridging cultures, preserving stories, and fostering global understanding. Behind every translated novel or work of nonfiction is a skilled translator carefully navigating language, nuance, and context to make ideas and stories accessible across borders. This month, we honor the often-invisible work of translators who connect people and perspectives—reminding us that language is not just a tool, but a bridge to empathy, knowledge, and shared humanity.

To celebrate, we’re sharing a reading list and excerpts of new and old favorites by writers and translators from around the world.

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Dealing with the Dead: A Novel
By Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson
(Congo)
From the author of International Booker Prize-shortlisted Black Moses, Dealing with the Dead is both a darkly funny ghost story and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence that reckons with Congolese history. The novel opens with our protagonist Liwa Ekimakingaï waking in a cemetery to discover he had died three days earlier, though he has no memory of the events that brought him there. Caught between the world of the living and the dead, Liwa embarks on a journey to say goodbye to his beloved grandmother and uncover the truth of his own murder.

 

 

Confidential: A Novel
By Mikołaj Grynberg, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye
(Poland)
This powerful novel is a darkly comic portrait of three generations of a Jewish family in contemporary Poland, struggling to express their love for one another in the face of a past that cannot and will not be forgotten. Confidential builds upon a story from Grynberg’s acclaimed short story collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, and follows a Holocaust survivor grandfather who now lives solely for pleasure, a physicist son born at the start of the war, and a firm but loving mother who secretly attends strangers’ funerals so she can cry.

 

 

Slave Old Man: A Novel
By Patrick Chamoiseau, translated from the French and Creole by Linda Coverdale
(Martinique)
Winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person’s daring escape from a plantation in Martinique. Pursued by the plantation owner’s fearsome mastiff, he journeys deeper into the untamed forest, where he begins to shed the psychological chains of slavery and reconnect with lost aspects of self and ancestral freedom. Chamoiseau’s exquisite novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose that becomes a lyrical meditation on liberation, identity, and the transformative power of nature.

 

 

The War: A Memoir
By Marguerite Duras, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
(France)
In The War, Marguerite Duras presents a raw, autobiographical account of her life in Nazi-occupied France and the immediate aftermath of World War II. Centered on her agonizing wait for her husband’s return from a concentration camp, the narrative unfolds through diary-like entries filled with fear, hunger, guilt, and the emotional devastation of war.

 

 

The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi
By Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, translated from the Gĩkũyũ by the author
(Kenya)
A literary titan, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s career spanned decades and genres, from fiction to criticism. He famously chose to write in his native Gĩkũyũ as a political and cultural act against the legacy of colonialism and linguistic imperialism. This dazzling, genre-defying novel (his only novel written in verse) retells the origin myth of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya from a strongly feminist perspective. An epic in every sense of the word, the book blends folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory to chronicle the efforts the founders Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine”—and the challenges posed to the 99 suitors who seek their hands.

 

 

A Meal in Winter: A Novel of World War II
By Hubert Mingarelli, translated from the French by Sam Taylor
(France)
This timeless short novel begins one morning in the dead of winter, during the darkest years of World War II, with three German soldiers heading out into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders with tracking down and bringing back for execution “one of them”—a Jew. Having flushed out a young man hiding in the woods, they decide to rest in an abandoned house before continuing their journey back to the camp. As they prepare food, they are joined by a passing Pole whose virulent anti-Semitism adds tension to an already charged atmosphere. Before long, the group’s sympathies begin to splinter when each man is forced to confront his own conscience as the moral implications of their murderous mission become clear.

 

 

“Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide
By Sven Lindqvist, translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate
(Sweden)
A searching examination of Europe’s dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, Sven Lindqvist takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. This brilliant and unsettling intellectual history is a powerful reckoning with the past and an indispensable contribution to the literature of colonial Africa and European genocide.

 

 

Viviane: A Novel
By Julia Deck, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale
(France)
Winner of the inaugural French Voices Award, Deck’s innovative novel was the first debut novel in a generation to be released by the most prestigious literary publisher in Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit. Viviane is both a taut psychological thriller and a gripping exploration of madness, a narrative that tests the shifting boundaries of language and the self, blurring the line between reality and delusion. The novel follows Viviane Élisabeth Hermant, a recently separated woman struggling with postpartum depression, who becomes entangled in a murder investigation.

 

 

Cobalt Blue: A Novel
By Sachin Kundalkar, translated from the Marathi by Jerry Pinto
(India)
Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity. Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in western India. Translated by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation and society in transition.

 

 

Eichmann’s Executioner: A Novel
By Astrid Dehe and Achim Engstler, translated from the German by Helen MacCormac and Alyson Coombes
(Germany)
Jerusalem 1961: in one of the most highly publicized trials of the century, former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, was sentenced to death by an Israeli military tribunal. His execution would fall to one of the twenty-two men who had guarded him during his imprisonment. Shalom Nagar, the only one among them who had asked not to participate, drew the short straw. Decades later, Nagar is living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, haunted by his memory of Eichmann. This gripping, provocative, and beautifully imagined work of literary fiction not only fearlessly explores questions of history, memory, guilt, and the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust, but also provides a fascinatingly multifaceted and deeply unsettling portrait of one of history’s most notorious war criminals.

 

 

Springtime in a Broken Mirror: A Novel
By Mario Benedetti, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor
(Uruguay)
The late Mario Benedetti’s work was often ranked with “such esteemed Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar” (The Washington Post). Set against the backdrop of Uruguay’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, Springtime in a Broken Mirror follows Santiago, a political prisoner, who was jailed after a brutal military coup that saw many of his comrades flee elsewhere. Feeling trapped, he can do nothing but write letters to his family and try to stay sane. Meanwhile, his wife Graciela and daughter Beatriz navigate life in exile in Argentina, struggling with grief, change, and the slow erosion of their connection to Santiago. Benedetti paints a tender, melancholic portrait of the indelible imprint politics leaves on individual lives and the enduring human desire for freedom and emotional truth.

 

 

Three By Echenoz: Big Blondes, Piano, and Running
By Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and Linda Coverdale
With an introduction by Liesl Schillinger
(France)
This single volume gathers together three of the most remarkable novels from Jean Echenoz, “France’s literary magician” (The New York Times Book Review). Big Blondes probes our universal obsession with fame as a television documentary producer tries to track down a renowned singer who has mysteriously disappeared. Piano brings Dante’s Inferno to contemporary Paris, following Max Delmarc, a concert pianist suffering from paralyzing stage fright and alcoholism, as he meets his untimely death and descends through purgatory. Running is a portrait of the legendary Czech athlete Emil Zátopek, who became a national hero, winning three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics even as he was compelled to face the unyielding realities of life under an authoritarian regime.

The first Labor Day parade took place in New York City on September 5th, 1882 as a demonstration for workers’ rights. Twelve years later, it was signed into a law as a national holiday to celebrate and honor the working class, and to give workers a day off.

Now more than ever, it is time to reflect on past success and on what can be achieved when workers realize their collective power and unite. These fourteen books on labor and organizing offer historical lessons and strategic insight.

Learn more about each title below, then head over to our Organizing IS Power mini site for special discounts and to claim a free ebook.

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Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice
By Erik Loomis
In this sweeping account of the impact of organizers, Loomis uncovers a rich and revealing history of social change activism with immediate relevance to our present. With an introduction that explains what organizing is and how collective action works—and how we should think about the power of organizing in 2025 and beyond—Loomis sets a tone that is both practical and historical. Read an op-ed by the author about the lessons we can learn from our organizing past to make change today.

 

Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today
Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti
This anthology highlights a rich tradition of thought that has long been championed by Dissent magazine. Founded in 1954—at the peak of union membership in the U.S.—Dissent has been a vital platform for critical analysis, spirited debate, and unwavering support for the labor movement. The pieces in Labor’s Partisans reflect this legacy, blending stunning writing, political passion, and deep historical insight. Read an excerpt here.

 

One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America
By Saru Jayaraman
In One Fair Wage, Jayaraman shines a light on how subminimum wage and the tipping system exploit workers, who are often society’s most marginalized, “while also outlining the straightforward, concrete solutions necessary to overcome this crisis. Saru Jayaraman is a vital leader fighting for economic justice across our country, and her voice and vision are a road map for all of us” (Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal). Read an excerpt from One Fair Wage in Eater.

 

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
By Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel’s classic oral history of Americans’ working lives celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2024 and remains as relevant today as it did in 1974. Consisting of a collection of over one hundred interviews with working class Americans, from gravediggers to studio heads. Read an excerpt from Working and other landmark Terkel books here.

 

In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers
By Bernice Yeung
Here, Pulitzer Prize finalist Bernice Yeung exposes the epidemic of sexual violence levied against low-wage workers, revealing the hidden economies that take advantage of immigrant women. In a Day’s Work is a “bleak but much-needed addition to the literature on sexual harassment in the US. . . . Building a cross-class movement, as Yeung shows, will mean learning to stop unseeing the working women around us” (New York Review of Books). Read an excerpt in the Guardian.

 

Power Lines: Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement
Edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir
An essential anthology that brings together leading organizers to share insights on the most effective ways to organize a labor movement for environmental justice. “Power Lines helps deepen the debate about how to unite and fight for a ‘Green New Deal’—or any better deal than the status quo” (Jacobin). Read an excerpt from the book in Fast Company.

 

A History of America in Ten Strikes
By Erik Loomis
A History of America in Ten Strikes is a “brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world” (Noam Chomsky). Readers will find that knowledge of the victories and defeats of the past can inform the strike campaigns of the current moment.

 

Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions
By Dave Kamper
Longtime organizer and labor historian Dave Kamper details how labor reemerged with newfound strength, as workers began to question the status quo and demand more from their employers. Interviewing workers and labor leaders across the country, Kamper captures the stories of those on the front lines, from Frito-Lay workers in Kansas and Chicago teachers, to Amazon warehouse employees in New York and Detroit autoworkers, offering a compelling account of how, in industry after industry, strikes, protests, and bold negotiations signaled the rise of a more coordinated effort to reclaim control over working conditions.

 

Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World
By Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce
How do underdogs, facing far stronger opponents, sometimes win? In the tradition of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce’s Practical Radicals offers winning strategies, history, and theory for a new generation of activists. Based on interviews with leading organizers, the book incorporates stories of organizations and movements that have won, including Make the Road NY, the St. Paul Federation of Educators, New Georgia Project, the Fight for 15, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and more. Read an excerpt in The Forge and listen to the companion podcast.

 

Pay the People!: Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America
By John Driscoll, Morris Pearl, and The Patriotic Millionaires
This “prescient and compelling call-to-action” (Library Journal) rebukes current wage practices and congressional paralysis and outlines a clear path to stable, inclusive growth. In an issue that is too often covered as a zero-sum game where there’s a winner and a loser, Driscoll and Pearl offer resounding evidence to the contrary.

 

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States
By Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty
A work of “impressive even-handedness and analytic acuity” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend tackles American history from the lens of working people, ranging from indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley. With material on sex workers, disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice movement, and more, authors Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty analyze labor’s role in American life.

 

Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
By Jefferson Cowie
This epic account recasts the 1970s as the key turning point in modern U.S. history. Cowie, with “an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America’s fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.

 

Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st-Century Social Movements
Edited by Shanelle Matthews, Marzena Zukowska, and RadComms
From an international cast of leading activist communicators, a timely and instructive handbook for telling stories that change the world. Liberation Stories features in-depth case studies of both contemporary and historical movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Fight for $15, health care for all, and more. Read an excerpt in Nonprofit Quarterly.

 

The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives
By Bryant Simon
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. In this “captivating and brilliantly conceived” (Washington Post) book, historian Bryant Simon uses a long forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm.

 

 

 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a literary titan. In a career that spanned decades and genres—from fiction to criticism, memoir to plays—his writing engaged with issues of political courage, resistance and the condition of colonial and neocolonial Africa.

Ngũgĩ emerged from a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s during the last years of colonialism in Africa. In the late 1970s he famously stopped writing novels in English and turned to the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ. His writing has been praised from the likes of President Barack Obama, the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and others.

To celebrate Ngũgĩ’s legacy and his range as a writer, we’re sharing excerpts from his five books published by The New Press.

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“In his crowded career and eventful life, Ngũgĩ has enacted, for all to see, the paradigmatic trials and quandaries of a contemporary African writer, caught in sometimes implacable political, social, racial, and linguistic currents.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

“One of the greatest writers of our time.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Ngũgĩ has dedicated his life to describing, satirising and destabilising the corridors of power.” —The Guardian

 

The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi
In his first novel written in verse, Ngũgĩ retells the origin myth of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya from a strongly feminist perspective. An epic in every sense of the word, the book blends folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory to chronicle the efforts the founders Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine”—and the challenges posed to the 99 suitors who seek their hands. This dazzling, genre-defying novel was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. The Guardian called The Perfect Nine, “a beautiful work of integration that not only refuses distinctions between ‘high art’ and traditional storytelling, but supplies that all-too-rare human necessity: the sense that life has meaning.”

 

Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o may be best known for his fiction but he was also a major postcolonial theorist. In Decolonizing Language, he gives us a series of essays that build on the revolutionary ideas about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity that he set out in his earlier work—illuminating the intrinsic importance of keeping intact and honoring these native languages throughout time.

 

Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening
In this acclaimed memoir, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, then known as James Ngugi, recounts the four crucial years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and his birth as a writer. It was at Makerere where he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist, a period where colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born. In a review of Birth of a Dream Weaver the Washington Post said, “no serious reader will want to miss this riveting story.”

 

Minutes of Glory: And Other Stories
Although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, Ngũgĩ honed his craft as a short story writer. The stories in this collection cover the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence, they feature women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society; big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. In a starred review, Booklist said, “this masterful, long-overdue, yet timely collection introduces Ngugi’s fiction to American readers.”

 

Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir
Ngũgĩ was arrested and imprisoned in 1977 for the political message of the play Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want), which he co-wrote with Ngugi wa Mirii. This powerful memoir begins literally half an hour before his release on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya’s Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison. In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation, the renowned author decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross. Ngũgĩ captures all of the drama and challenges of writing under twenty-four-hour surveillance and the pain of being torn from his family.

 

 

By Shalra Azeem, Spring 2025 Intern

National Book Award–winning author Robert Jay Lifton is a pioneer of the field of psychohistory. Psychohistory is a field of study that blends psychology, history, and other social sciences to analyze human behavior and understand the emotional reasoning behind behaviors of individuals and groups from significant moments in history. Lifton, having been drawn to this field after interviewing WWII survivors of Hiroshima in the 1960s, has since used psychology to better understand the psychological effects of war and mass political violence. In addition, Lifton has focused his studies on renewal and thought reform in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lifton’s three titles at The New Press showcase different ways in which the field of psychohistory can be implemented to analyze historical moments and find hope for our present and future.

 

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Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic
In Surviving Our Catastrophes, Lifton calls upon his extensive knowledge of the human response to mass tragedies such as Hiroshima and the Holocaust to chart a path of hope and resilience when confronting the lasting effects of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. Now in a paperback edition with a new epilogue from the author, Lifton asserts that we cannot force the pandemic into the rearview mirror but rather must confront the effects of COVID on individuals and our society in order to achieve forms of renewal.

 

Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry
In this unique and radical volume, Lifton makes a connection between the psychologies of extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults. In Losing Reality, Lifton describes how the “apocalyptic impulse” is not limited to religious cults, but is present in Nazism and Chinese Communism, and in groups surrounding Donald Trump. However, in true Lifton fashion, he also sees the psychological ability of humans to regain reality and adapt.

 

The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival
Whereas Lifton’s other books deal with swift, undeniable disasters, this one speaks to an apocalyptic danger that has creeped in and has not elicited the same immediate reaction. Lifton uses his expertise in psychology to identify humanity’s response to numb themselves to this danger and suggests how we may mobilize ourselves towards climate awareness and action.

 

Lifton has been called “one of the world’s foremost thinkers on why we humans do such awful things to each other,” (Bill Moyers) but he is also an intellectual who has taken a lifetime of scholarship on mass tragedies, disasters, and misfortunes, and dedicated himself to finding, within those events, examples of human resilience and renewal. By consuming Lifton’s work, you will not only find yourself deep in the realms of politics and psychohistory, but you will also find mediations on hope and approaches to inch closer towards a more peaceful and sustainable world.