Women in Translation Month is around the corner! Last year, I compiled a list of translated books by women that I enjoyed and created a Women in Translation Bingo game. I also wrote about novellas by Marguerite Duras and Eileen Chang and poetry collections from Rocío Cerón and Angélica Freitas.This summer has been a bit more hectic as I've been teaching more, taking my second novel through an eighth draft, and researching my third novel. However! I'm excited for Women In Translation Month and wanted to share with you four books on my to-read pile.What have you been reading? 
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10:30 on a Summer Night operates at a slow boil. The noir-ish 80-page novella follows a French couple, Pierre and Maria, on vacation in Spain with their four-year-old daughter Judith and their friend Claire. The story opens with talk of a murder in the small town where they've landed, their plans to get to Madrid thwarted by a storm. Rodrigo Paestra, having killed his wife and her lover, is on the run. With that crime of passion in the background, tension between Pierre, Maria, and Claire builds, complemented by the landscape's moody weather:
"The afternoon's dark blue, oceanlike mass moved slowly over the town. It was coming from the east [....] The water that ran between their feet was filled with clay. The water was dark red, like stones of the town and the earth around it."
Maria drinks manzanilla after manzanilla. Customers in a local cafe talk about the horror of Paestra's crime while "eating, more or less heartily." Like many tourists stuck in the town for the night, the family and Claire must sleep in a hotel hallway. In Maria's wooziness, her thoughts drift between Paestra's whereabouts (they say he's on the rooftops), and the possible budding infidelity between Pierre and Claire. Her restlessness tears her from the claustrophobic hotel hallway, out into the wet night, looking for Paestra:
"He had gone around the chimney. Maria kept singing. Her voice clutched her throat. You can always sing. She couldn't stop singing once she had started. He was there."
The novella twists and turns into scarier and scarier landscapes.The extreme weather of the lightening storm is followed by extreme mid-day heat of the open country. Maria wonders, "What would you save, if you took Rodrigo Paestra to France?" The double love triangle leads to a bizarre chain of events I have no intention of spoiling. But the last image of the three adult travelers at a night club, finally in Madrid, watching a man with a "chalky laugh" singing with "loving, languorous, nauseous drunkenness," evokes the complexity, the utter tangled thorniness, of this story.
You can get a copy here.
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My sixth set of writing prompts for the Ploughshares blog dives into the vast territory of creative writing involving music, with wisdom from E.M. Forester, Milan Kundera, and Maya Sonenberg, and a short list of reading suggestions from Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" to a forthcoming novel on the inventor of the theremin.