As 2022 winds down, we're reflecting on the best books we've read this year, which includes many (many!) books in translation. Feature here are a few of our staff picks translated from the French and Japanese: 'Kibogo' by Scholastique Mukasonga, 'My Manservant and Me' by Hervé Guibert, 'Dead-End Memories' by Banana Yoshimoto, and 'All the Lovers in the Night' by Mieko Kawakami. Make sure to check our Instagram stories this week for more of our favorite books from 2022! We're open all week for in store browsing as well, closing at 6pm on New Year's Eve and opening late at 1pm on New Year's Day. — "Put down your trauma plots, skip those fictions of irredeemable suffering—pick up Banana Yoshimoto instead. In the five stories of 'Dead-End Memories,' broken people are put back together again, not through miracles or cartoonish romance, but how it actually happens: with time; with the help of a well-placed stranger; with a small choice that makes a great difference. Maybe you can make one of those choices today: read her, and be healed." — Jack, Nolita "'All the Lovers in the Night' is a balm for tense nerves, a light in the dark for anyone who has ever felt ashamed, lost, and unlucky in love. In Mieko Kawakami's world, ordinary things become strange and hilarious: a smiling woman looks like a piece of cabbage split 'perfectly in two,' a person wearing an ear-flapped hat appears at the top of an escalator like 'a piece of luggage emerging from the baggage claim.' There are very few writers whose work I follow with a religious fervor, and Kawakami is one of them." — Peter, Downtown Brooklyn "'My Manservant and Me' is a horrifying yet comedic tale of elder abuse and Stockholm Syndrome." — Lexi, Nolita "Give Scholastique Mukasonga 150-odd pages and she will produce an epic, populating a Rwandan hillside with dozens of richly drawn characters and building a stage on which the myths of the colonizers and the colonized wage war. Around the fire pit, the villagers ask: who is it that brought the rain? Some say Kibogo, some say Christ. For the reader, it is Mukasonga herself who performs the miracle, blanketing the world with life." —Jack, Downtown Brooklyn