Natasha Wimmer | The New York Review of Books

The Bureaucrat in His Labyrinth

Benito Pérez Galdós’s mid-career novel Miaow sketches the absurd tribulations of a laid-off civil servant.

Miaow

by Benito Pérez Galdós, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

December 4, 2025 issue

Rigorous Innocence

A new volume of essays and crónicas by the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart is often funny and sad in equal measure, as the stories follow her travels from Buenos Aires to Guadalajara.

A Question of Belonging

by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, with an introduction by Mariana Enríquez

April 10, 2025 issue

The Watercolorist

The short fiction of Ángel Bonomini possesses a lightness that sets him apart from contemporaries like Borges and Cortázar.

The Novices of Lerna

by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman

July 18, 2024 issue

Scrupulous Extravagance

The Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist Alejo Carpentier depicted revolution’s promise as well as its folly.

Explosion in a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with a foreword by Alejandro Zambra

The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, with an introduction by Leonardo Padura

February 22, 2024 issue

The Friction of Language

The novelist Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, often makes translation one of her central themes.

Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani

March 9, 2023 issue

At the Center of the Fringe

The Mexican writer Sergio Pitol shaped Latin American letters with work that was as strange and playful as his own life.

The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Enrique Vila-Matas

The Journey

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Álvaro Enrigue

The Magician of Vienna

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Mario Bellatin and an afterword by Margo Glantz

Mephisto’s Waltz

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson, with an introduction by Elena Poniatowska

The Love Parade

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by G.B. Henson

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August 18, 2022 issue