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Back to School

School from every side of the desk. A New York teacher losing her grip in front of a class of boys; a Bucharest schoolmaster whose notebooks turn strange; a girl on Réunion who treats the schoolhouse as an escape route; a Yorkshire headmistress fighting the county council over drainage and scholarships. Nine of these ten come from independent presses, five arrive in translation, and none of them are the school story you were assigned.

10 booksAugust 2026

01
The Coin
Yasmin Zaher
Catapult is one of the few American independents still betting on genuinely strange first novels. This one won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2025 and reads like nothing else on a school shelf.
02
Solenoid
Mircea Cărtărescu
Deep Vellum in Dallas takes on the translations nobody else will fund; Sean Cotter's version won the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. Cărtărescu taught Romanian in a Bucharest school himself, which is exactly where the book begins.
03
There's a Monster Behind the Door
Gaëlle Bélem
Bullaun Press is a tiny Irish house publishing nothing but literature in translation. Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert's translation went from there to the International Booker longlist and won the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, which exists specifically for presses this size.
04
Heaven
Mieko Kawakami
Europa Editions — the independent that brought Ferrante into English — publishes Sam Bett and David Boyd's translation. Shortlisted for the International Booker in 2022 and still the least sentimental school book here.
05
Optional Practical Training
Shubha Sunder
Graywolf, the Minneapolis nonprofit press. Sunder won a Whiting Award in 2025 and this debut was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; almost nobody has read it yet.
06
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Graywolf's edition, introduced by Kwame Anthony Appiah, put one of the essential novels of Zimbabwean literature back into American bookshops after years of scarcity.
07
Jakob von Gunten
Robert Walser
NYRB Classics keeps Walser alive in English in Christopher Middleton's 1969 translation. Kafka was an early admirer, and it shows: this is the school novel that dissolves the entire idea of instruction.
08
South Riding
Winifred Holtby
Virago Modern Classics rescued Holtby from being a footnote in Vera Brittain's biography; this edition carries Brittain's epitaph and a preface by Shirley Williams.
09
The Class
François Bégaudeau
Seven Stories Press publishes Linda Asher's translation. The film took the Palme d'Or in 2008; the book is the stranger, better thing, and almost nobody reading in English has picked it up.
10
Lower Ed
Tressie McMillan Cottom
The New Press is a nonprofit publisher set up to print the books commercial houses skip. Foreword by Stephanie Kelton.