Today, we’re going to revisit a wild TMR season in which we featured three books originally written in Spanish, all published right around the start of the pandemic . . . Below, you’ll find info and links to all the episodes on��Cars on Fire��by Mónica Ramón Ríos & Robin Myers, Four by Four��by Sara Mesa & Katie Whittemore, and The Book of Anna��by Carmen Boullosa & Samantha Schnee.

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We started this season off with . Here’s the jacket copy:

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of characters—the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student—whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic,��Ríos��offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile’s La Zona Central, the stories in��Cars on Fire��offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces—xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world—that shape life in Chile and the United States.

And here are links to each Cars on Fire episode:

Episode 1: Pages 1-63 (, , )

Episode 2: Pages 64-151 (, , )

Episode 3: Pages 152-End (, , )

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Then we moved on to��. Here’s the jacket copy:

Set entirely at Wybrany College—a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities—Four by Four��is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany’s “program” is always palpable, but never explicit. The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the “special,” scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.

In the second part—a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an imposter who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher—the eerie sense of what’s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister.

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.

And here are links to each Four by Four episode:

Episode 4: Pages 1-86 (, , )

Episode 5: Pages 87-156 (, , )

Episode 6: Pages 156-222 (, , )

Episode 7: Pages 223-End (, , )

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And we wrapped things up with��. Here’s the jacket copy:

IN THIS CONTINUATION OF ANNA KARENINA’S LEGACY, RUSSIA SIMMERS ON THE BRINK OF CHANGE AND THE STORIES THAT HAVE LONG BEEN KEPT SECRET FINALLY COME TO LIGHT.

Saint Petersburg, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the vivid portrait that the tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts Anna wrote just before her death, which open a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairy tale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapon, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, plan protests that embroil the downstairs members of the Karenin household in their plots and tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa tells a polyphonic and subversive tale of the Russian revolution through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

Episode 8: Pages 1-73 (, , )

Episode 9: Pages 74-98 (, , )

Episode 10: Pages 99-126 (, , )

Episode 11: Pages 127-161 (, , )

Episode 12: Pages 162-End (, , )

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Enjoy!

And while you’re here, you should get a copy of�� and be ready for Season Twenty of TMR starting on September 6th!

This week’s music is “Dead Men Don’t Rape” by 7 Year Bitch.

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . The next broadcast will be on . Robin Myers will be the special guest, and we’ll focus on pages 152-175. This will be the final episode on��Cars on Fire��before we move on to��Four by Four��by Sara Mesa and Katie Whittemore. (For which there is an !)

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And you can get 20% off by using the code 2MONTH at checkout. (Offer only good in the U.S., since we can’t ship overseas, but to be honest, we can’t ship right now! Order it from .)

You can also support this podcast and����������of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

( copyrighted by .)

In honor of Mia Zapata, this week’s music is “Another Shot of Whiskey” by The Gits.

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . The next broadcast will be on . Mónica Ramón Ríos will be the special guest, and we’ll focus on pages 64-151.

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And you can get 20% off by using the code 2MONTH at checkout. (Offer only good in the U.S., since we can’t ship overseas, but to be honest, we can’t ship right now! Order it from .)

You can also support this podcast and����������of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

—William Poundstone,

It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list author writing in English. There are additional costs—not just in terms of paying the translator, which is baked into the idea of publishing books from around the world and shouldn’t be something publishers complain about—such as increased expenses to tour an author, the mental stress of having to work approximately ten times as hard to get the same level of attention given to books written by Americans, the fact that most translation-centric presses are non-profits, which means that in addition to all the normal publishing tasks, you also have to spend a significant amount of time filling out grant applications and final reports, running fundraising campaigns, cultivating major donors, and working with a board of directors.

Richard Nash used to say that all indie press publishing is two fuck-ups away from collapse. Presses specializing in international lit? We might only be one fuck-up away. Or one COVID-19.

Just because I have the tendency to ramble, I’m going to drop the lede right here, then circle back: Open Letter needs your support more than ever before. Everyone’s struggling, there are hundreds of worthy causes and orgs to donate to, but if you like our books, our free content, our role in the translation-ecosystem, please consider to us. I don’t want to sound alarmist—or at least not more than is warranted—but we need a lot of things to break our way to continue operating like we have for the past thirteen years.

Last post, I shared a graph of how our sales fell off the ledge in April, seriously jeopardizing our chances of having our best year ever. (Which we were on pace for through March!) But, in a way, that chart is misleading. The numbers are all accurate, it’s just that this chart is basically everyone’s chart. (Unless you work in the booze industry! According to an ad on Instagram, liquor sales go up 243% during quarantine. Which, well, um, that data �󲹲���to be a sample size of one, so . . .)

The long-term consequences of lockdown, of having 20% unemployment, of dealing with uncertainty and fear of a future outbreak will be screwing things up for the foreseeable future, no matter how much Trump and protestors want to wish that away.

Which brings me to my actual point: Open Letter isn’t just suffering because it’s hard to sell a lot of books right now, but because more than a third of our revenue comes from the URochester. The education crisis is so pervasive and terrifying—and impossible to address as a whole—but thanks to sending students home, refunding room & board fees, having worries about fall enrollment, and employing large numbers of people whose jobs don’t���徱���𳦳ٱ�����generate revenue, higher ed is in some massive trouble.

I don’t have/won’t share the specifics about the URochester, but I was forced to furlough Kaija for two months and Anthony for three weeks, and every division on campus is taking a hit to their budget. It doesn’t help that the UR Medical Center is and is furloughing 20% of its staff.

All of this is to say that things might be evolving at Open Letter over the next months and years. In the current environment, the model we’ve been operating under doesn’t seem sustainable. What will this mean? Nothing drastic right now, but we’re going to have to reassess how we allocate our resources. Which may include having to cut back on the altruistic things we do for the larger community (from posts about other press’s books, to podcasts, to running weekly translation workshops, to speaking with whomever asks for advice), since these are all unfunded.

Again, if Open Letter is at all a meaningful part of your literary life, I hope you’ll consider to us. The U of R’s donation site is a bit clunky, since you have to “select a designation” choose “other-write in” and then write in “Open Letter,” but it can be done. Or you could mail us a check directly if that’s easier. For worse, these appeals from us are going to become much more commonplace—even after “all this.”

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OK, now that that’s out of the way—sorry, but if you knew the level of anxiety and uncertainty I’m dealing with in regard to the press you would know just how restrained those above paragraphs really are—let’s get to the fun stuff!

So, this week’s post is actually three posts, a triptych of posts. (If you’ll forgive a bit of pretentiousness.) There are linkages between the three, and I’m actually experimenting with writing all three simultaneously, but, to be honest, they’re each pretty separate from one another.

I want to start this one by recommending����by Mónica Ramón Ríos, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers. This was our April publication, officially releasing on April 14th, which isn’t great for a book that was positioned to take off thanks to bookseller love and recommendations . . . Just check out this quote from a *starred review* in��: “Ríos’s themes are unwaveringly contemporary—LGBTQ and feminist issues; immigrant life; politics—but it is artistry, not dogma, that guides her prose. This is art house literature at its best: provocative, alluring, and uncompromising.”

These stories are��fierce. As mentioned above, they’re uncompromising in both their stylistic approach and political aims. They’re fun, yet unnerving. They’re playful in form, without fear of experimenting. (“Invocation” is told in two voices running in parallel down the pages.) They are, in short, fire.

This is going to be the next Two Month Review book (official schedule to come, but we’ll be talking about it live on June 3, 10, and 17, and both Mónica and Robin will be honored guests), so I’d highly recommend ordering it so that you’ll have it in time.

To celebrate the release of��COF, the��Southwest Review��ran this incredible conversation between Ríos and Myers, which I wholeheartedly recommend . But here are a few fantastic bits:

Robin Myers: I’d like to ask you instead: how did the collection come to be structured for you? And in what ways did you feel, as you wrote the stories, that they were speaking to each other? As I translated, I sometimes imagined them as a kind of song series: one completely different musical experience after another, jarring and thrilling in their contrasts, their color-scapes. But sometimes I thought of them more as a chorus: all speaking up at the same time, all claiming their place in a kind of riotous multiplicity. I’d love to have you discuss the relationships among the stories as they revealed themselves to you.

Mónica Ramón Ríos: The urge to write these stories emerged, among other things, from a localized, experiential, desire-based knowledge/belief that the self is a perilous fiction that has been imposed on us both by very good literature and by very poor books. And I say this not because I read all the poststructuralists (which I did) or the postmodernists (which I ditched), but because I rebel against the idea of fixity, of borders, walls, names, or any supplementary tools to define being, voice, or even our work as anything more than fiction­­. I learned to write at a time when Chile was plagued by very bad neoliberal realism, which coincided with the most treacherous moments of Chilean politics: when the left sold the country and settled with the dictatorial right to create a new transactional structure of power—this is the order we are trying so hard to remove right now in Chile. In terms of literature, the transparency and immediacy of neoliberal realism was not only trying to oppose the literature of the ’80s (a dense oppositional, feminist, queering, literature of protest against univocal dictatorial violence, but also of military stupidity, embodied by the Ministry of Censorship). At the same time, in fact, neoliberal realism was trying to hide those power transactions. And it meant wanting to write like the��gringo��literature exported to Chile��because the whole country wanted to enjoy their fucking McDonald’s. What came out of that was not literature, but a new writer who was a vendor, a new literature that was a product. It wasn’t even entertaining, because it made you lethargic, like the joints mixed with glue we’d buy on the cheap as teenagers to pass days that felt eternal and useless. This was a literature without consequences. But even back then, we still craved those moments of intense understanding that made us become��trabajadores de la letra,��writer-workers.

So, yes, the voice of��Cars on Fire��is a riot. I wrote all of the short stories, except one, after moving to the United States. And in many ways their voice also riots against the inherent racism in this country, especially the one concealed behind niceness. I aim my pen at those people who abuse us saying they are helping us, saying they are our friends.

RM: It seems to me that two of the central forces at work in the book are, on the one hand, the human thirst for revenge (explored especially in part one, “Obituary”), and, on the other, the exhilarating multiplicity of love and desire (which particularly characterizes part two, “Invocation”). Part of what fascinates me about the book is how your ventures into the intentionally exaggerated or even the fantastical—I’m thinking of the comical distortedness of the academic administrator in “The Head,” the amorphous creature in “Extermination,” or the sinuous human-animal metamorphoses in “Invocation”—affects the dynamic between your characters and their environments, or with each other. Or would you object to my use of the word “fantastical” here? Maybe what I’m really asking is how you see, and like to channel, the slipperiness of place, time, and form in your work.

MRR:��I would rephrase it as Mónica Ramón’s thirst for revenge and their desire for the exhilarating multiplicity of love. I see the stories you’ve mentioned as pure realism. I say this with a mischievous intent to contend the possibilities of the real and to subvert the straitjacket that has constricted our experiences.

Again, read the whole thing .

Also, check out this that’s part of Caroline Alberoni’s “” series;

CA: Besides being a translator you are also a poet. Does being a poet help as translator and vice-versa? If so, how?

RM: It absolutely helps. Both poetry and translation (and by this I mean the translation of anything, not just poetry) are practices rooted in the materiality of language. If you write poetry or translate anything, you are in the business of dealing with words as stuff, as resources, as concrete elements you shape and combine to form certain structures and spark particular effects in the reader. Of course, in translation, you’re using language in response to—in relation to—language that already exists in the world. You’re writing (because translating is also writing) in the service of and in complicity with that language. In this sense, too, translation demands both that you saturate yourself with the original text and that you distance yourself from it. That doubleness has helped me write my own poetry, I think, at least in the sense that it’s made the experience of writing poetry much more interesting. For one thing, it’s made me more conscious of the artifice of whatever I’m doing (and I mean “artifice” not as an insult but as a fact). For the same reason, it’s also made me feel freer to experiment: to think with more curiosity and more gratitude about language as “tools” and how I might try them out. I do feel that writing poetry affects my translations as well, or my approach to translating. For example, I care a great deal about sound when I write poetry, about what happens to words when we string them together and speak them aloud, and I feel a similar need to “hear” what language does in translating both poetry and prose. That said, I don’t mean to talk about this obsession with sound as if it were strictly the domain of poetry, much less of poets, because that’s not the case at all! I’m just musing about what it��feels��like for me in going about things as I go about them.

Also, you can purchase Robin’s most recent poetry collection, , in a beautiful bilingual edition from Antílope Press in Mexico.

Final thing! On Wednesday, May 13th at 7pm eastern, you can see Mónica Ramón Ríos in conversation with Carmen Boullosa via .

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Sticking with the idea of these biweekly posts being some sort of quarantine reading diary, I have to take a paragraph to praise Zulfikar Ghose’s . This isn’t coming out until September, but it’s a truly beautiful book. I mostly know of Ghose from the issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction that featured him (together with Milan Kundera), but his life and career are fascinating.

Born in Pakistan, he lived in London in the 1950s and 60s, then moved to Texas in 1969. He’s written a dozen novels,��and an equal number of poetry collections and works on nonfiction. He even co-authored a book of short stories with personal favorite B. S. Johnson. ( sounds particularly interesting to me. Especially in combination with Patrik Ouředník’s (trans. Alex Zucker), which is near the top of my to-read pile.) He’s been praised by T. S. Eliot!

For whatever reason, the books that have worked best for me in quarantine have been British. Or at least set in London. Escapism + mid-50s British charm works for me. Which is why I plowed through��Kensington Quartet��in just a couple days.

It’s a tricky book, a book of memories and nostalgia in which the narrator is wandering around London, remembering earlier versions of himself as if they still physically exist. It’s a short novel of memory and landscape, an ode to London that will appeal to lovers of Esther Kinsky or other meditative, geography of memory type, flaneur writers.

It also opens in Kensington Gardens following almost the��exact same path��I walked when I was there on March 10th, before the world completely fell apart.

I am here now, just inside Kensington Gardens.

To the north the pebbled concrete expanse of the Broad Walk slopes up towards a pale blue sky above Bayswater. Two women with bundled-up toddlers and another pushing a pram, and farther up shadowy figures of three men in charcoal-grey coats, there is a scattering of ghostly bodies on the Broad Walk, the light so unusual, almost too bright, aglow in my mind, a surprisingly illuminated London. Glancing back in the direction of Palace Gate, I observe that you are striding up in that jaunty walk of yours, always so enthusiastically eager for the grass under the elms and a view of the Long Water. There are no shops to distract you, only consulates of foreign lands across the road you have no interest in, one displaying a flag, green and white, of indistinguishable nationality, hanging too limply. Your step always quickens in Palace Gate when the distant green blur of Kensington Gardens first catches your eye and even when the day is overcast and grey you see a sudden green shiver in the sky, for you it’s the pulse of London, throbbing, as if it were your blood that surged with a sudden passion and made your breath come hard and loud—as that first time, that April, which then became the loveliest of months, when the first of English green you saw was here—all those prints of Constable’s landscapes in the Blackie readers coming alive in the grass at your feet—and your blood bounded in amazement. Another three minutes and you will be coming into the Gardens, inflating your chest when you enter, as is your habit, taking a deep breath and holding it a long moment as when the doctor, his stethoscope’s cold disc on your chest, says, Breathe in and hold, listening to your heart.

Ghose’s writing is simply delicious. The more grounded moments—of the narrator’s first experiences in school, when he nearly has a fling with a gay friend of his teacher’s, when things don’t work out with his various girlfriends—are conventionally compelling and well-crafted, but it’s in the long descriptions, the meanderings, the way that he constructs a palpable sense of London that the prose excels. In a way, this book is a throwback. The narrator’s life resembles Ghose’s in some superficial ways, but it doesn’t feel like the “I” fiction so predominant these days. It’s an attempt to create something beautiful and heartfelt, an archeology of emotional memories tied to a very specific place.

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Last bit of self-promotional stuff . . .

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve participated in two virtual events to support ��by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore.��Since neither space nor time really make sense anymore, I thought I’d share both of them here.

First up was the Wordplay event with both Sara and Katie. This one is bilingual in a fun way, mostly about the book and Sara, and features one of the funniest event moments I’ve seen, when Katie flees her daughter and her daughter’s “Let it Go”-playing birthday card.

powered by Crowdcast

Designed to be a complement to that event, the one Katie and I did for the Transnational Series at Brookline Booksmith is all about translation, crafting voice, interesting challenges Katie had to deal with, and a fun “mercenaries vs. soldiers” bit.

powered by Crowdcast

I hope you enjoy both, and please buy a copy of the book from one of the two organizations that hosted us!

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of female characters―the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student―whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic, Rios offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile’s La Zona Central, the stories in��Cars on Fire��offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces―xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world―that shape life in Chile and the United States.

�� Here’s one of the stories from the opening section of the collection.

“The Writer”

I move in slender fog
but I still wear
the features of my face
. . .
and I answer to my name
although I’m someone else by now.
��

Gabriela Mistral, ��ྱ�����DZ������,” Poem of Chile

��

Before the writer died, she’d held long meetings with her lawyers to discuss the possibility of being buried far from her country of origin with all the papers she’d written and never published.

One of the envelopes I’d found on her nightstand, even before I realized that the body in the bed was no longer breathing, contained the signed papers. My name was written in trembling letters on another, smaller envelope with the unmistakable green ink she used to draft her manuscripts. Inside it was a long letter dated two days before. It explained why she felt it would do no one any good to read her old notebooks. They’d only find her sorrows, her regrets—not because her life had been dissatisfying, but because her papers were crammed with experiences that had plagued her repeatedly in the form of dreams, night terrors, or when she forgot to take her pills—an empty medicine bottle on her nightstand—even when the people involved were long dead. No one could possibly benefit from reading a compendium of humanity’s most hideous features, which had pervaded the writer like fog.

As she once read in a mediocre book—her steady, uniform handwriting informed me that this was how she judged most of her contemporaries—the passing of time was supposed to imply that one had acquired a certain wisdom in focusing on pleasurable things—I could almost hear her say the words, her voice dense with sarcasm. Ever since she was a young woman, she had devoted her mind to resolving things that any reasonable person would dismiss as unimportant. But they reminded her that there was essentially nothing, deep down, to distinguish her from the gargoyles trapped in limbo between the St. Vitus Cathedral and the rest of Prague. Maybe this was only obvious to me because I’d spent so many years helping her with her work and her personal affairs, years in which my own writing was starved of attention, withered by the emotional paroxysms that periodically disfigured the writer’s face—the scratch on my left cheek smarted at the sight of her lifeless nails peeking out from under the sheets. It wasn’t that she’d killed anyone—with reference to the legal scandal that hounded Mario Vargas Llosa and Rubén Santos Babel—or that she’d destroyed young female writers who wrote like her—an allusion to the article she’d written under a critic’s pseudonym for several journals in her home country. What she meant is that she’d let her nightmares ruin every moment of her life, every relationship, every place she’d ever visited—her complaints filled interminable paragraphs. I skimmed them. She hated people, she mistrusted them, and perhaps, the writer mused, her sole raison d’être was to work out their basest inclinations, to fix a clinical eye on everyone who entered her field of vision. Where could this destructive instinct have originated, if she’d had an idyllic childhood and the world rose up sweetly to meet her? Even at a very young age—I remembered the time she’d shoved that academic out of an elevator—she couldn’t stand places where people congregate: museums, concerts, parties, gatherings, offices, conferences, readings, houses, living rooms, hallways, public restrooms, and assembly halls. She didn’t know how to behave among people she actually knew. She felt more comfortable as the eternal, ever-inaccessible foreigner. This was the source of her countless woes and afflictions, and it explained why she was always on the move.

I thought I heard a sigh leave her body as it lay prone. Out of habit, I got up to check on her. I looked at her face for the first time since I’d entered the room. Her eyes were half-open, her eyelashes metallic. Her skin had taken on the texture of drying wall sealant. Gum, I heard myself say, my voice a wispy thread.

I opened the windows to air out the medicinal smell that had thickened during her dragged-out death throes, real or imagined. I sat down in an armchair to watch the sun shifting along the rug until it reached the foot of the bed and illuminated a delicate curtain of dust spilling down from the books on the nightstand.

Sometime in her thirties, the writer had decided that the only way she could keep on living was to document her regrets in curt, precise, objective sentences. Attaining this literary distance from her own memories, the writer continued, her penmanship listing forward into dramatic peaks, was the only way she could forget. The bookshelves in her house soon filled with notebooks, and the notebooks filled with endlessly repetitive phrases. And so on for decades. The letter piqued my interest at last.

I daydreamed about where the notebooks might be. I knew she’d stashed some of them away in the walls, but what if there were more?

They were nothing but pages and pages of useless drivel—I sensed, in the letter, the writer’s desperation to dissuade me from the search, and I felt a rush of pleasure—that no one in their right mind would waste more than an instant thinking about. They overflowed with events that were of little interest to anyone, not even the writer herself, but would soon lodge themselves in her mind like inflection points with hundreds of possible interpretations. Later, much too late, the writer realized things she’d done, emotions she never knew she’d felt. As she stood in the kitchen, knife poised over the butter, or just before bed, or subsumed in a deep sleep, they’d reappear. Then she’d take out whatever notebook she was keeping at the time.

The sentences soon turned into verses. The verses into songs. The songs into elaborate precepts on the meaning of life that seeped into her work, the speech of her characters, her narrative style, her own voice. I could almost hear her declare “Tell me what it feels like to be alive,” the edict that would become, thanks to an erroneous attribution, her most frequently quoted line. She never dared correct the misunderstanding. It hounded her when she won those prizes. It plagued her on the death of the stepdaughter she’d cared for as her own, and even when her own death started nipping at her heels. As soon as anything receded into the past, she realized that she actually enjoyed her friends’ mistakes, enjoyed contributing to the demolition of the young man who approached her as she prattled on in a corner of the hall, enjoyed pronouncing stark truths that caused the ruin of her loved ones.

I put down the letter, half-read—I couldn’t take any more of her whining—and glanced at her motionless body. Then I opened all the little wooden doors in the room that had been her workplace for so many years. I stared at the spines of the notebooks. They covered more than an entire wall, spilling out of the shelves she’d built herself, hidden behind the books. She always used the same kind of notebook at first, but they soon started changing size and color. There was a thick-notebook period and a small-and-thin-notebook period. Later, she’d settled on a specific kind of notebook that was bound in bluish leather and ruled with lines that were far too wide for her tiny script.

I sat down in her reading chair, switched on the lamp, and started paging through them. The same stories were repeated over and over in different syntax, in different words intentionally overlaid with contradictory meanings. She omitted information that appeared later on, or rearranged events out of order, or included explanations where there hadn’t previously been any. The stories grew longer and more complex. Then they shrank down until they all seemed like the very same story endlessly written and rewritten. In the last notebooks, the stories morphed into mere lines, as if marking her mental activity in waves, peaks, and valleys, grounded in nothing but the green strokes of a pen on paper.

I was supposed to organize the funeral. She’d made the request in writing, the lawyers told me that night. This information and her other wishes lured journalists like wayward men to siren songs. Disputes with the leaders of the writer’s sect were made public. Under the dark tunics and demonic masks they used to conceal their identities, they declared that her body must be buried without pollutants: naked and alone. No one but they must know the location of her grave, and no mark or fire must inscribe it. After a long discussion among the lawyers, trying to avert a scandal, and after various intrusions by the literary milieu and the fans amassing outside what had been the writer’s home, but now served as storage for my furniture, I managed to orchestrate her cremation behind everyone else’s backs and attended it as a spectator.

“One cold winter evening, I stood before the snow-white body of the writer and watched it blaze inside a concrete grid.” So begins my prologue to the edition of her Dirty Notebooks, which is how I chose to title the anthology of her posthumous work.