New Books in Language and Translation

With Taiwan Travelogue winning the 2026 International Booker Prize, Taiwanese literature in translation has achieved new heights of visibility in the Anglosphere.

In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with writer and translator Kevin Wang about his English language rendition of Spent Bullets (HarperCollins, 2025), another Taiwanese novel that Taiwan Travelogue’s translator Lin King herself recommended to English-language readers.

Written by a former Google engineer using the pen name Terao Tetsuya, Spent Bullets contains nine interconnected stories about a group of Taiwanese men as they journey through Taiwan’s most prestigious schools to Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies.

Despite being the “elite”, these characters find themselves mired in a swamp of nihilism, resorting to suicide attempts and sadomasochism as outlets for their constantly oppressed psyches. The novel represents a darkly humorous take on Taiwan’s omnipresent achievement culture, as well as another critically celebrated example of the island’s burgeoning body of queer literature.

Other works that Kevin mentions in the podcast:


Kink: Stories — by R.O. Kwan and Garth Greenwell


Overfitting — by Terao Tetsuya, still pending translation


Mobu’s Diary —by Kathy Lam, translated by Kevin Wang and Cindy Ko


Kevin's recent interview by Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu, in which he discusses communities in Taipei in greater detail

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.
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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) about his 2025 paper, Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. The conversation focuses on minoritised languages, autonomous language learning, and language activism.

Reference:

Betancor-Falcon, S. (2025). Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 44(6), 647-662. DOI here

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close.When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s.As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn’t thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States.A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth’s own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me (37 Ink, 2026) follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map.

You can find Elizabeth on her website, Instagram, and TikTok. Her viral Ted talk, “Why it’s so hard to talk about the N-word,” is here. And Richard Pryor: Live in Concern (1979) can be streamed on YouTube. 

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Names are incredibly powerful things and are a crucial part of the way we see and classify the world around us. Plant names are especially fascinating in this respect. Some are simply descriptive or speak of ancient uses and remedies, whilst others have religious origins or roots in wider folklore, and some are very recent inventions.

Scottish Plant Names: An A–Z (Birlinn, 2026) by Dr. Gregory Kenicer introduces almost 300 plant names to showcase the enormous variety of Scotland’s native species. It includes English, Gaelic and Scots (Including dialect) names, revealing the country’s diverse linguistic history. Short descriptions, together with historical and cultural information in each entry, make this book an ideal companion for all those with an interest in Scotland’s rich botanical tradition.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Sh. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920) was a writer in Russian and Yiddish, a revolutionary, a wartime relief worker, and an ethnographer who studied the Jews of the Russian Empire. During his 1911-1914 expeditions to shtetls in Ukraine—he would report—he and his co-workers took 1000 photographs, recorded 1000 Yiddish songs and 1500 stories, and purchased 400 objects for a Jewish museum. The expedition also inspired An-ski to write his signature play, The Dybbuk. Although East European Jews used ethnographic tools to study themselves both before and after An-ski’s expeditions, he retains an outsize status in the field of Yiddish ethnography, strongly tied to the success of his play. This talk explores the connections between An-ski’s ethnographic work, his play, and the Russian politics of his era.

This lecture originally took place on July 8, 2021.
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