Hip, irreverent, comic, bizarre -- these aren’t exactly the words you might think to use when asked to describe writers in today’s international literary scene, especially when they hail from regions with deep-rooted traditions of censorship like Russia, China, and Japan. But after Perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, global consumerism, the World Wide Web, tightly chaperoned visits between North and South Koreans, and most recently the Chinese President Jiang Zemin agreeing to be interviewed by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes,” the world is not what it once it was.

This seems to be a common, underlying theme for some of today’s most influential international authors: No matter where they’re from, these writers seem to reflect the world’s increasing globalism (what some might call “Americanization”), and its effects on their own national culture and identity. With their liberal use of pop-culture references, along with a tendency toward fractured, multi-storied narratives, their books create a fascinating mix of the familiar and foreign. Below are some of today’s most exciting, young, inventive, and influential authors making noise in the international literary scene today.

See also our shelf on International Mysteries!

My Name Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
Pamuk, probably the only contemporary Turkish writer most of us have ever heard of -- and for good reason -- delivers to our shores his latest novel. My Name Is Red, unlike Pamuk's previous books set in modern Turkey, looks back at the perils of religious repression in 16th-century Istanbul. When the Sultan commissions a great book to celebrate his royal self and his extensive dominion, he directs Enishte Effendi to assemble a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed, and no one in the elite circle can know the full scope or nature of the project. Panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears, and the Sultan demands answers within three days. The only clue to the mystery -- or crime? -- lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Has an avenging angel discovered the blasphemous work? Or is a jealous contender for the hand of Enishte’s ravishing daughter, the incomparable Shekure, somehow to blame? A fantasy, a philosophical puzzle, a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex, and power, My Name Is Red should cement Pamuk's reputation as one of world literature's leading lights.

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Please Don't Call Me Human
by Wang Shuo
Immensely popular among Chinese workers and students, Wang Shuo is regarded as the father of the new school of “hooligan literature.” Understandably, he is not quite appreciated by China’s powers that be, and in the late 1990s his four-volume collected works were pulled from the shelves for being “reactionary” and “vulgar.” Unfazed by the government’s negative response to his oeuvre, Shuo has continued adding to it, and his latest work will probably not improve his image -- at least in the Chinese government’s eyes. Taking its reference point as Beijing’s loss to Sydney in hosting the 2000 Summer Olympics (which many Chinese took as a national loss of face, though they've recently regained it) Shuo creates in Please Don’t Call Me Human a comic, sometimes cartoonish satire about a group of profiteers in search of a national hero -- someone who might restore the nation’s pride after having suffered a shattering defeat at an international wrestling competition. Some highlights include an encounter with Buddha, and a sex-change operation.

Buddha's Little Finger
by Viktor Pelevin
Pelevin, a Russian, is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and talent as a pure fabulist have won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, Bulgakov, Gogol, Phillip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller. In Buddha's Little Finger, Pyotr Void, a leading St. Petersburg poet, unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of the 1919 civil war in Russia, serving as commissar to the legendary Bolshevik commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, and his formidable machine-gunner sidekick, Anna. What follows jumps in space and time from 1919 to a psychiatric hospital in present-day Moscow, interspersed with a dream starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is a work of absurdity unleashed, building on the excellence of Pelevin’s earlier novels and short-story collections.

Sputnik Sweetheart
by Haruki Murakami
From one of today's most successful Japanese novelists (with a strong following in the states as well), Haruki Murakami's seventh novel is a movingly simple, yet very Murakami-like (i.e. odd, quirky, compellingly strange) chronicle of unrequited desire. The narrator, a Tokyo college student falls in love with a classmate, Sumire, whose devotion to Kerouac and untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments -- that is until she meets an older and far more sophisticated businesswoman named Miu. The two women embark on a surreal trip that takes them from the worlds of parochial Japan to Europe and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece, where Sumire disappears without a trace, leaving only strange fragmented clues to her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events, stories within stories. The narrator, now a teacher, summoned to assist in the search for Sumire, experiences his own dark and haunting visions, which lead him nowhere but home to Japan -- and there, under the expanse of deep space and the still-orbiting Sputnik, he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved. A love story, a missing-person story, a detective story -- all enveloped in a philosophical mystery -- and, finally, a stirring meditation on human longing, Sputnik Sweetheart is sure to win Murakami more readers, while confirming his status as one of the modern world's most exciting and original writers.

Read an excerpt!

The Elementary Particles
by Michel Houllebecq
Recently profiled in The New York Times Magazine, Houellebecq is being touted as the biggest literary sensation in France since Camus. Appropriately, The Elementary Particles is a novel of “big, important themes”: the descent of Western culture into an orgy of consumerism, the decline of Christianity, the potential of human cloning, and -- what’s really causing an uproar among his fellow countrymen -- the destructiveness inherent in the liberal values and sexual permissiveness of the 1960s. But don’t let that intimidate you: The Elementary Particles is a cleverly constructed, though at times antagonistic, narrative written in a straightforward voice, enlivened by moments of grotesque humor and tenderness, as well as (he is French after all) long and glorious passages of despair and self-loathing -- and all of it topped off by a spectacular ending. How can you resist?

The Funeral Party
by Ludmila Ulitskaya
The first novel by Russian contemporary Ulitskaya (trained as a geneticist) to be translated into English -- and more than likely not the last. Set in August 1991, in a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian emigres gathers around the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he approaches his own conclusion. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN? Simultaneously funny and sad, and devastatingly keen in its observations of character, The Funeral Party introduces to a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.