November Feature: Memory, pt.2

This November, we read with memories.

In the quiet of November, let us read with memory. 

As the year’s end approaches, we naturally find ourselves reflecting on what has passed – the people and places that have shaped us, the histories that live on in us. The books in this month’s series remind us that every story is a repository of memory, whether it’s one person’s childhood home, a nation’s collective trauma, or the hidden struggles of everyday lives. They invite us to engage in that most human of acts: remembering.

So, brew a cup of something warm, find a cozy nook as the cold wind rattles at the window, and crack open one of these works. Read slowly, linger in the lyrical moments and personal recollections, and allow your own memories to resonate with those on the page. In doing so, you’ll not only honor the voices captured in these books but also the echo of your own experiences. This November, let memory be your reading companion – a gentle guide through stories that illuminate the past and enlighten the present.

Happy reading, and may the rest of your autumn be filled with meaningful pages and warm reflections.

Memory is a homeland: An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author.

A place we carry within us, especially when we re far from home. In An I-Novel, acclaimed Japanese author Minae Mizumura draws on her own life to craft a story of longing, language, and identity that blurs the line between fiction and memoir. The novel unfolds over a single contemplative day in the 1980s, as Minae – a Japanese expatriate in her late twenties – sits in her apartment across from an American university, reflecting on the twenty years since her family left Japan.

Mizumura has decided to return to Japan to become a novelist in her mother tongue, and throughout the day she talks on the phone with her sister, trying to articulate why she can no longer remain in the U.S.

An I-Novel retains a special literary distinction: when first published in 1995, it was considered Japan’s first “bilingual novel,” daringly incorporating English phrases and Western references into its Japanese text. Translator's English edition cleverly uses varying typography to give readers a sense of this bilingual experience. At its heart, though, is the voice of a young woman aching for a place that exists now mostly in her memory. “All through my girlhood, I was consumed by thoughts of the homeland I’d left. I longed for it with an intensity that words like ‘yearning’ or ‘nostalgia’ could not convey,” Mizumura writes, “Japan steadily grew to near-mythic dimensions in my mind.”

This profound nostalgia – the almost mythic image of Japan she has constructed – is both Minae’s solace and her burden. As the day passes and dusk falls, she recalls childhood scenes, cultural touchstones, and the emotional alienation of living between languages. An I-Novel reads as a meditation on the immigrant experience, on the way one’s first language and memories of home form an identity that cannot be easily shed. Mizumura ultimately suggests that to find oneself, one may need to return to the origin of one’s story. In doing so, she offers a beautiful testament to the enduring power of memory: it can guide us home, even when “home” has become more dream than reality.

Memory is an elegy: Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi.

A poem of remembrance for those who have passed, a ritual of naming the unnamed in history’s shadows. In Autobiography of Death, Kim Hyesoon, one of South Korea’s most important poets, presents memory as a chorus of the dead speaking back to the living. This innovative collection, translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi, consists of forty-nine poems – each representing one of the 49 days that, in Korean tradition, a spirit roams the earth between death and reincarnation.

The work is, in effect, a single extended elegy fragmented into many voices. Through visceral, surreal imagery, Kim Hyesoon gives voice to those who met unjust or violent ends in Korea’s tumultuous contemporary history. “The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent history, but also unveil what Kim calls ‘the structure of death, that we remain living in,’” the publisher notes.

Reading these poems is a haunting experience: you encounter a “plural ‘you’” – a collective soul – that has “been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history,” yet still speaks in defiance. There are moments of anger, mourning, tenderness, and even dark humor, all swirling together like spirits at a midnight requiem. Don Mee Choi, who has translated Kim’s work for years, renders these complex pieces in an English that is at once lyrical and jarring, preserving the urgency of the original.

Winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize, Autobiography of Death is not a light read, but it is a deeply profound one. It asks us to listen to the voices of the departed and to recognize that their stories are part of the living world’s memory. In doing so, it becomes an act of collective mourning and a powerful indictment of the forces that create such ghosts. Kim Hyesoon shows that remembering the dead – writing their “autobiography” after death – is itself a form of justice and love, a way to keep them among us a little longer.

Memory is a dream: I Found Myself: Last Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz, translated from Arabic by Hisham Matar.

Dream, dream, dream. Elusive, illuminating, and often a melding of what was and what might have been. In I Found Myself: Last Dreams, we are gifted the final, posthumous visions of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate. In his 90s, no longer able to write long novels, Mahfouz turned inward to his dreams – and over the last years of his life, he produced a series of short, haunting dream vignettes that blend memory, fantasy, and philosophy. These “stunning poetic miniatures” have now been brought beautifully into English for the first time by Hisham Matar (the Libyan-British novelist, acting here as translator).

I Found Myself: Last Dreams is a slim book, but it contains multitudes. Each piece reads like a parable from a parallel world: familiar Cairo streets and faces morph into symbolic landscapes; friends, family members, and long-ago loves appear in brief, luminous scenes; and Mahfouz himself often drifts through the narratives, an old man lucidly dreaming his life. Recurring figures, such as a much-missed youthful lover who may represent Cairo itself, tie the dreams together into a mosaic of an aging writer’s soul.

Mahfouz had survived an assassination attempt in 1994 that greatly curtailed his ability to write, and there’s a palpable sense of twilight in these pieces – but it’s a gentle twilight, filled with wisdom and acceptance. As Hisham Matar observes in his introduction, for Mahfouz “writing, much like dreaming, is a process of weaving together the remembered past, the imagined future, and the present.”

Indeed, reading these dreams feels like slipping into a quiet reverie where time bends: the past and future converse, and long-lost friends share a cup of tea as if no years have passed. The book is enriched by atmospheric photographs from Diana Matar, which accompany the text like visual echoes of Mahfouz’s subconscious.

In the end, I Found Myself is both melancholy and comforting. It gently reminds us that in our final season of life, memories may visit us like dreams – offering not only sadness for what’s gone, but also strange beauty and solace, a way of finding ourselves even as we prepare to say goodbye.

Memory is a conversation: I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki & I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee, translated from Korean by Anton Hur.

I miss her. I miss the writer. I was waiting for more conversations from her conversation with the therapist. But. she left us, last month. An now, I think this is the best time we to read her, again.

These ongoing dialogue we have with our past selves – a dialogue that can heal when spoken aloud. In these two books, Baek Sehee invites readers into the most private of conversations: her therapy sessions. This book, a massive hit in South Korea, is a young woman’s frank account of living with persistent depression (specifically dysthymia), structured as a series of edited dialogues between Baek and her psychiatrist.

Translator, Anton Hur with disarming candor, the text reads at times like a diary or a transcript of Sehee's inner thoughts -- one reason she begins by warning readers, "you may feel embarrassment, shame or judgement, as if you are reading a diary entry of your own." The tone is intimate and vulnerable. She is so generous with us that she is welling to share this much with us, and hope we could be heard and seen by reading her words.

The writer discusses everything from her feelings of emptiness and self-doubt to her guilty pleasures and small hopes. She reflects on formative memories -- for instance, how as a child she learned to bottle up her feelings, or how she constantly compares herself to others -- and in doing so, she starts to untangle the knotted threads of her past.

The motif of tteokbokki, the beloved Korean street food in the title captures the unique balance of the darkness and light within in all us: I want to end everything, but I feel the hunger; I want to end everything, but I got to pay the bill; I want to end everything, but I need to go to school...I... I ... I.... Even when we feel life is not wroth living, some part of us still delights in simple joys like...like what?...Baek Sehee is not here anymore.

Through her conversation, the writer gradually comes to understand that not all emptiness needs to be filled and that one can “live with her scars” without being defined by them.

I miss her. I miss her voice. I know I don't know her, but her writing saved me and a lot of others. These two books are gentle reassurance that we are not alone in our messy, human conversations with ourselves -- and that even in the darkest moments, the memory of happiness, or anything small, maybe, maybe still can keep us going. Maybe.

Memory is resistance: You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine edited by Sherah Bloor and Tayseer Abu Odeh

The act of remembering can itself be an act of defiance against erasure. You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine is a forthcoming anthology (September 2025) that brings together a vibrant range of contemporary Palestinian poets, each one using memory as a tool of survival and assertion. The collection is translated from Arabic and edited by Sherah Bloor and Tayseer Abu Odeh, with a guest editor, the esteemed American poet Jorie Graham.

As the title “You Must Live” suggests, there is an urgent, life-affirming spirit running through these poems – a voice that insists on existence and witness even amid profound hardship. The works gathered here are written by poets currently living in the West Bank and Gaza, many of whom have never been able to leave their land. They “bear witness to the realities of the Palestinian genocide” and occupation, but notably, these poets “refuse to cast their speakers as perpetual victims.”

Instead, a rich chorus of tones and styles comes through: some poems are “powerful, prayerful,” others darkly humorous or sharply satirical, but all are grounded in a deep love for Palestinian life and landscape.

We read love letters to olive groves and childhood streets, elegies for martyrs and demolished homes, and fierce lullabies for future generations. The act of writing and sharing these poems is part of a cultural memory that resists oppression. In one excerpted poem, a grieving friend says, “What scared him most was being forgotten.”

The answer these poets give is to remember – to remember in ink and verse those who are gone, and in doing so, to ensure they are not forgotten. Every poem in You Must Live feels like a small light kept alight against howling wind. This anthology is a testament to how literature can uphold the memory of a people: each page defies the narrative of disappearance and proclaims, in a multitude of poetic voices, that we are here, we remember, and we will live.

Memory is a burden: Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, translated from Arabic by Barbara Romaine.

A weight of the past that one may choose, sometimes desperately, not to pass on. In Sand-Catcher, a darkly comic and deeply poignant debut novel by Omar Khalifah, the concept of collective memory and its pitfalls takes center stage. Originally published in Arabic in 2020 and translated into English by Barbara Romaine, Sand-Catcher follows four young Palestinian-Jordanian journalists in Amman who are on a quixotic mission: to interview a 95-year-old Palestinian man about his memories of the 1948 Nakba – the cataclysmic displacement of Palestinians when Israel was created.

The twist? Their would-be witness, Abu Suleiman, has absolutely no intention of recounting his trauma. In fact, his greatest wish is “to die without being forced to tell anyone about 1948.” He greets the earnest reporters with stony silence and eventually an expletive-laden expulsion from his home, shattering their assumptions about survivors’ duty to testify. Through biting satire, Khalifah “satirizes the idea of telling your story as a noble or even politically effective pursuit.”

The young journalists, whose own careers hang on extracting a headline-worthy testimony, have internalized the mantra that “the world has declared war on the collective memory of the Palestinians… and you’re a soldier on the right side of this war”, as one of them pleads to the old man.

But Abu Suleiman’s refusal – his very silence – flips the script. It forces the question: Whose memory is it, and who has the right to demand its telling? As the frustrated reporters scheme to uncover his story by other means, absurdity ensues, and we see how personal histories can be co-opted, sensationalized, or simplified in service of a “cause.” Sand-Catcher is at once a witty newsroom caper and a profound meditation on the ethics of memory. Khalifah shows us a man who carries the burden of an unbearable past and chooses, in an act of autonomy, to carry it to his grave. The novel’s clever allegory suggests that while collective memory is crucial, it must reckon with individual pain. Sometimes silence isn’t forgetfulness but the only refuge left to those who have already lost everything. In reading Sand-Catcher, we are prompted to consider the heavy cost of remembering – and the even heavier cost of demanding remembrance from those who owe us nothing.

Memory are parcels and maps: I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, translated from Chinese by Jack Hargreaves.

An atlas of our labors and dreams, drawn from the streets we travel every day. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan is a bracing journey into the life of a delivery courier and the myriad other jobs he’s held in China’s booming gig economy – a journey charted with such honesty that it becomes a map of a generation’s psyche. This memoir, translated from Chinese by Jack Hargreaves, has been described as “an unvarnished dispatch from the front lines of the gig economy”.

And indeed it is unvarnished: Hu Anyan spares no detail of the drudgery, uncertainty, humor, and occasional joy that color his years of hustling for work. As a young man from a rural area, Hu cycled through nearly every low-wage job available – security guard, convenience store clerk, warehouse loader, and most prominently, a parcel delivery driver on the streets of Beijing. Each role is a point on the map, a coordinate in the story of modern China’s working class.

With a wry, matter-of-fact tone, he recounts how his days were spent searching for affordable rooms and his few moments of leisure were consumed by calculations – how much alcohol he’d need to sleep, but not oversleep. Yet amid the grind, Hu finds meaning in small things: a shared cigarette with a coworker, a brief rest under a bridge, the satisfaction of finishing a route against the odds. He also finds salvation in storytelling. During the COVID lockdowns, Hu began writing essays about his experiences and posting them online.

To his surprise, these candid writings resonated with millions, striking a nerve with young readers who also felt “at odds with an ever-growing pressure to perform and succeed” in modern China. This book is listed by the People's Daily in China as a must-read and recommend to everyone to read. This book is also a bestseller in 17 countries, gives a face and voice to those often unseen in glossy city narratives. Hu’s memoir is a focused, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work set against the backdrop of any economic rise.

It reads, at times, like the urban successor to nomadic tales of survival – think of it as Nomadland meets Nickel and Dimed, but in the sprawling metropolis of Beijing. By the end of the book, the “map” we have traced is not just Hu’s individual path, but a wider landscape of economic reality that many around the world will find familiar. Hu Anyan’s gift is to show that every mundane delivery route is rich with stories, and that memory lies in the details: the creak of an elevator at midnight, the glow of a 24-hour noodle stand, the ache in one’s legs after 14 hours on the move. Following this map of memory, we come to appreciate the resilience of the human spirit – how one can keep moving forward, parcel by parcel, story by story, in search of a better tomorrow.