Short stories by Marianne Villanueva, and novels by Amy Tan, Avdotya Panaeva, Sayaka Murata, and Domenico Starnone

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She's leaning forward, as if to kiss him. There's a mark on his cheek; perhaps she's done it already. They are both smiling. 
          These were my parents in Manila, circa 1956. They were happy; they had always been happy. The happiness of their marriage was like a reproach. 
—From Mayor of the Roses, a collection of short stories by Marianne Villanueva (Miami University Press, 2005). This segment is the opening of "Picture" (pp. 87-92).

[Art's daughters] wore their long chestnut hair alike, pulled into ponytails high on their heads so that they cascaded like fountain spray. All their friends wore their hair in an identical style, Ruth had noticed. When she was their age, she had wanted to grow her hair long the way the other girls did, but her mother made her cut it short. "Long hair look like suicide maiden," LuLing had said. And Ruth knew she was referring to the nursemaid who had killed herself when her mother was a girl. Ruth had had nightmares about that, the ghost with long hair, dripping blood, crying for revenge.  
—From The Bonesetter's Daughter, a novel by Amy Tan (Ballantine, 2001). This is from page 21 of the trade paperback.

In a room lit by a dim candle, they washed the dead body of my six-month-old sister. . . . The room was silent; neither my father nor my mother cried. Only the wet nurse cried—about the gilded cap and fur coat that she had lost due to my sister’s premature death. If the baby had waited five or six months longer to die, the nurse's work would have been through, and the promised reward would not have slipped through her fingers.
—From The Talnikov Family, a novel by Avdotya Panaeva, translated from the Russian by Fiona Bell (Columbia University Press, 2024). 

In the sex education class the next day, though, I was taught something completely different [from what my mother had explained to me]. We were made to watch endless videos about the mechanism of artificial insemination and the mystery of bringing a new life into the world.
—From Vanishing World, a novel by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Press, 2025).

Between the ages of eight and nine, I set out to find the pit of the dead. At school, in Italian class, I had recently learned about the legend of Orpheus and how he travelled to the underworld to bring back his girlfriend, Eurydice, who, unhappily, had wound up there after getting bitten by a snake. My plan was to do the same for a girl who was not my girlfriend but who might be if I managed to lead her back above ground from below . . . 
—From The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa Editions, 2024).