The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

Piedmont, Italy, the setting for Lalla Romano’s A Silence Shared. Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories (volumes 1 and 2), edited by Patrick McGuinness (Penguin Classics, £30 each)
It’s hard to imagine a better introduction to French literature than this glorious two-volume bran tub of short fiction, featuring 84 authors over almost 900 pages, running from the 15th century (Philippe de Laon, Marguerite de Navarre) to the day before yesterday (Marie NDiaye, Virginie Despentes). There are plenty of old favourites – Vivant Denon’s corrupt love story No Tomorrow, Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, Maupassant’s terrifying The Horla – outstanding masterpieces all. Highlights among the modern stories include Charles Dantzig’s Ballardian story of a dying man taking to the road (“The motorway is right. It will help me become more perfect”). There’s a welcome playfulness throughout, as in Georges Perec’s exquisite The Winter Journey, or in Émile Zola’s cynical Death by Advertising, where a man who believes everything he reads, including book reviews, decides to buy “only those books described as ‘outstanding masterpieces’, thereby reducing his purchases to some twenty books a week”.