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The “propulsive and mesmerizing” (The New York Times) story collection by the International Booker–shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Our Share of Night—now with a new short story. The short stories of Mariana Enriquez are: “The most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro “Violent and cool, told in voices so lucid they feel spoken.”—The Boston Globe (Best Books of the Year)
Electric, disturbing, and exhilarating, the stories of Things We Lost in the Fire explore multiple dimensions of life and death in contemporary Argentina. Each haunting tale simmers with the nation's troubled history, but among the abandoned houses, black magic, superstitions, lost loves and regrets, there is also friendship, compassion, and humor. Translated by the National Book Award-winning Megan McDowell, these “slim but phenomenal” (Vanity Fair) stories ask the biggest questions of life and show why Mariana Enriquez has become one of the most celebrated new voices in global literature.
The “propulsive and mesmerizing” (The New York Times) story collection by the International Booker–shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Our Share of Night—now with a new short story. The short stories of Mariana Enriquez are: “The most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro “Violent and cool, told in voices so lucid they feel spoken.”—The Boston Globe (Best Books of the Year)
Electric, disturbing, and exhilarating, the stories of Things We Lost in the Fire explore multiple dimensions of life and death in contemporary Argentina. Each haunting tale simmers with the nation's troubled history, but among the abandoned houses, black magic, superstitions, lost loves and regrets, there is also friendship, compassion, and humor. Translated by the National Book Award-winning Megan McDowell, these “slim but phenomenal” (Vanity Fair) stories ask the biggest questions of life and show why Mariana Enriquez has become one of the most celebrated new voices in global literature.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
My family thinks I’m crazy, and all because I choose to live in our old family home in Constitución, the house that once belonged to my paternal grandparents. It’s an imposing stone building on Calle Virreyes, with iron doors painted green, art deco details, and old mosaics on a floor so worn out that if I ever got the urge to wax it I could open up a roller rink. But I was always in love with this house. I remember when I was little and my family rented it out to a law firm and I got so upset; I missed those rooms with their tall windows, and the walled patio that was like a secret garden. I hated not being able to just go in anytime I passed by. I never really missed my grandfather, a silent man who hardly smiled and never played—I didn’t cry when he died. I cried a lot, though, when after he died we lost the house for several years.
After the lawyers a team of dentists moved in, and then the house was rented to a travel magazine that folded in under two years. The house was beautiful and comfortable and in remark- ably good condition considering how old it was, but by then no one, or very few people, wanted to settle in that neighborhood. The travel magazine went for it only because the rent was very low for the time. But not even that could save them from quickly going bankrupt, and it certainly didn’t help that their offices were robbed: all their computers were stolen, plus a microwave oven and even a heavy photocopier.
The station in Constitución is where trains coming from the south of the country enter the city. In the nineteenth century it was the area where the port’s aristocracy lived; that’s why houses like my family’s exist, and there are plenty of others that have been converted into hotels or old folks’ homes, or are crumbling to the ground on the other side of the station, in Barracas. In 1887, the aristocratic families fled to the northern part of the city to escape the yellow fever. Few of them came back, almost none. Over the years, families of rich businessmen like my grandfather were able to buy those stone houses with their gargoyles and bronze door knockers. But the neighborhood was marked by that flight, the abandonment, the condition of being unwanted.
And it’s only getting worse.
But if you know how to move around the neighborhood, if you understand its dynamics, its schedules, it isn’t dangerous. Or it’s less dangerous. I know that on Friday nights, if I go down to Plaza Garay, I might end up caught in a fight between several possible adversaries: the mininarcos from Calle Ceballos who defend their territory from other occupants and chase down the endless people who owe them money; the addicts who, brain- dead as they are, get offended at anything and react violently, lashing out with broken bottles; the drunk and tired transvestites who have their own patches of pavement to defend. I also know that if I walk home along the avenue I’m more exposed to a robbery than if I take Solís, even though the avenue is well lit and Solís is dark; most of the few streetlights it has are broken. You have to know the neighborhood to learn these strategies. I’ve been robbed twice on the avenue, both times by kids who ran past and grabbed my bag and pushed me to the ground. The first time, I filed a police report; by the second I knew it was pointless. The police let teenage muggers rob on the avenue as far as the highway bridge—three free blocks—in exchange for favors. There...
About the Author-
Mariana Enriquez is a writer and journalist based in Buenos Aires. She is the author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction, and the novel Our Share of Night. Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today. Her translations have won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize (four times) and the Kirkus Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, Kentucky, and lives in Santiago, Chile.
Reviews-
January 2, 2017 Morbid tales of contemporary Argentina animate Enriquez’s memorable collection of short fiction. In “The Dirty Kid,” a privileged woman comes to believe that the homeless boy who lives outside her building has been the victim of a beheading, only to later learn that his fate is much more complicated. A young girl inexplicably disappears into an abandoned home, never to be seen again, in “Adela’s House,” while a broken-down car causes a tenuous marriage to disintegrate in “Spiderweb.” At their best, stories such as “An Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt” recall Stephen King at his most literary, grounding supernatural horror allegories in a detailed realist tableau. But even the weaker sections convey the singular strangeness of life as a woman in Argentina, where instability seems to haunt every facet of existence—the electricity, the currency, the concept of family—and sudden, otherworldly violence is always at one’s doorstep. Enriquez’s debut collection is elevated by its vivid locale and its deft inclusion of genre sensibilities.
December 15, 2016 A dozen eerie, often grotesque short stories set in contemporary Argentina. This debut collection by Buenos Aires-based writer Enriquez is staggering in its nuanced ability to throw readers off balance. In the opening story, "The Dirty Kid," a graphic designer becomes obsessed with a homeless pregnant woman and her son, a mania that worsens when the decapitated body of a child is dumped nearby. The author's rich descriptions of narcos, addicts, muggers, and transvestites quickly transport readers to an alien world. There are two very different tales of haunted houses in "The Inn," in which a tourist hotel built on a former police barracks contains forces unknown; and "Adela's House," in which the title character steps through a door in an abandoned house--and is never seen again. "The Intoxicated Years" is a sly accounting of five years of increasingly severe drug use among a clique of friends. Then there are the truly monstrous stories that are likely to make readers peek between their fingers. In "No Flesh Over Our Bones," an anorexic woman anthropomorphizes the human skull she finds in the street. "Vera and I are going to be beautiful and light, nocturnal and earthy; beautiful, the crusts of earth unfolding us. Hollow, dancing skeletons." In "The Neighbor's Courtyard," a depressed woman is convinced a neighbor has chained up a young boy until she's face to face with the feral, fanged boy, who eats her cat: "Paula didn't run. She didn't do anything while the boy devoured the soft parts of the animal, until his teeth hit her spine and he tossed the cadaver into a corner." Still others reveal hidden humanity. In "End of Term," two unwell girls find common ground. Finally, the title story chronicles a bit of mass hysteria in which women start self-immolating as a protest against domestic violence. A rich and malcontent stew of stories about the everyday terrors that wait around each new corner.
COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
February 1, 2017 These stunning, incandescent stories by Argentine writer Enriquez are her first to be translated into English, and each one crackles with sophisticated weirdness, illuminating everyday activities against the underbelly of the macabre. The Dirty Kid presents an unnerving, sympathetic portrait of life on rough city streets, in which Enriquez renders graphic details with uncanny precision, luring readers into the brutal, repellent scene. The Inn deftly balances small-town rumor, budding sexuality, and inexplicable hauntings when two teenage girlfriends plan to prank a local innkeeper and witness the inexplicable. Spiderweb takes place in an equally eerie roadside motel on the Paraguayan border, where a truculent husband goes missing without a trace. Many of these stories flirt with the supernatural or suggest strange coincidences, but others embrace literary horror with cackling glee. End of Term takes up the familiar trope of a possessed child and makes it new with the concise, unsettling narration by a classmate who witnesses every step of the ensuing unraveling. Similar to Shirley Jackson and Jac Jemc, Enriquez is certain to dazzle and discomfit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
September 15, 2016
Black magic, heartbreak, street kids, derelict houses, a child who kills babies, and women who protest domestic violence by setting themselves on fire. Argentine-born Enriquez's dark and febrile imagination has attracted international attention; this collection has sold to 20 countries.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2017
This is the first taste English-language readers are getting of Argentine writer Enriquez's imaginative stories. Each piece contains an entire universe, with sparse, well-chosen details bringing to life the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, the smaller Argentine towns, and the daily existence of characters. Some begin with characters' personal problems, such as "The Neighbor's Courtyard" and "Spiderwebs," before the paranormal appears (or seems to appear). Whether these apparitions are real or the manifestations of troubled minds is unclear. Other stories, such as "End of Term" and "Adela's House," are more classic ghost stories one could imagine whispered around the campfire (e.g., "She went through the door in the wall and was never heard from again!"). There are also stories in which groups practice barbaric rituals, including "The Dirty Kid" and "Under the Black Water." VERDICT Fans of modern magical realism in the vein of Kelly Link will eat these tales up, although they may occasionally turn the stomach. Essential for readers of Roberto Bolano, Paul Auster, or any literary fiction that tends toward the uncanny. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Dave Eggers
"Mariana Enriquez is a mesmerizing writer who demands to be read. Like Bolaño, she is interested matters of life and death, and her fiction hits with the force of a freight train. "The Dirty Kid" is one of the most memorable and brave stories I've read in years. It lingers in the mind for weeks, and redefined my sense of Buenos Aires, a city I love dearly."
Laura van den Berg
"When I read Mariana Enríquez's stories, I forget where I am. I miss my subway stop. I hold my breath. Her fiction is that pulse-racingly superb, that electric and original. Mariana Enríquez is an essential voice in contemporary fiction, and The Things We Lost in the Fire will be a sensation."
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