It’s a book that����praised, stating “the novel’s dream logic is as intoxicating as the secluded setting. Readers will eagerly turn the pages of this beguiling literary thriller.” And none other than Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu claimed��Of Beasts and Fowls��is “the most haunting [novel] I have read in years.”

To celebrate this release (the first of two Adón books we’re doing), we’re offering a for the rest of the month. (No checkout code required, U.S. purchases only.)

And to entice you further into this witchy, captivating novel, below you’ll find an excerpt from when Coro arrives at Bethany and has her first interaction with it’s inhabitants.

Also: Sign up for the for more insights into how this book came to be, how it’s being reviewed, and other news from Open Letter. (And an easily accessible way to listen to this conversation with Pilar.)

She’d put a cotton jacket on over her T-shirt, foregoing the summer raincoat she kept in the backseat. If she had to sleep in the car, she would use it as a blanket.

Once she had a handle on the scene—the black fence and the vegetation that grew up around it, the stone walls bordering the lane—she zipped up her jacket and switched on the overhead light. From her purse, she took out a handkerchief embroidered with the letter C and her sketchbook. Maybe there was a security camera on the fence, pointing down at her. Her fixed image at the center of a monitor. Wide-eyed. She was going to write that she needed help on a piece of paper and put it on the windshield, in case somebody, somewhere, could read it. And she was going to draw using the dashboard for support. It was the only thing that would calm her right then, while she got used to the idea that this thing was happening to her. She had actually gotten lost. Her fingers were cold, but she opened the sketchbook and leaned on the dashboard. That’s when she saw that someone was approaching the gate with a flashlight.

“What are you doing here?” The stranger addressed her with the formal you.

She found it odd that a stranger would ask her the exactly same thing she’d been asking herself.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

She rolled down the window.

“I’m lost,” she said.

“What are you looking for? Are you looking for something?”

“I’m running out of gas. I need to know if there’s a gas station somewhere nearby.”

“Are you wanting a house? What do you want? To rent or buy?”

She heard.

“I’m lost. Can you help me?”

“People love coming around here. They’re attracted to the scenery.”

Coro put the handkerchief in her purse and got out of the car.

The woman was opening the gate.

“I just need to turn around and get back to the main highway, but I can’t move with all those planks on the ground. And I’m not sure if I have enough gas. Do you know if nearby . . .”

“It’s not easy to get here. Where do you live?”

The woman drew closer and pointed the flashlight right at her face. She shut her eyes.

“Don’t do that. Please.”

“You’re not from around here.”

She wasn’t going to repeat that she was lost.

“There’s nothing for sale in the area. It’s even worse the closer you get to the mountain. You have to turn around, go back to the flatlands. There are more houses there. More properties.”

“You’re mistaken. I don’t want to buy anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

Coro looked inside the car, still illuminated by the overhead light. Her purse. Her things.

“I’m running out of gas.”

“You’ve said that already.”

For a second, she thought the best thing would be to be clutching the steering wheel again. To put a piece of gum or candy in her mouth. Her breath probably stank.

“Do you have a car? Maybe we could take some gas from your tank and put it in mine. I’ve seen it done, you suck it through a tube.”

The woman shined the flashlight in her face again.

“What’s your name? What’s your surname? I’m not bringing a stranger to my house.”

“I just need a little gas.”

“Have you come alone?”

The woman inspected the inside of the car, the backseat, and asked again what her name was and if she had come there alone.

“I better go. I’ll try to turn around.”

“I think it’s reasonable to want to know the name of the person who has just plunked herself down on my doorstep at this time of night.”

“It wasn’t intentional. I’m telling you.”

She got into the car. The flashlight was right back in her eyes again.

“Come on. Come with me. We’re going to try this tube thing. We have two cars down below.”

The woman said to follow her.

“I don’t want to bother anyone.”

The woman would go on foot and Coro would follow, behind the wheel. That’s what she proposed.

“It’s downhill. It’s fine.”

“Listen . . . Why don’t you bring your car up here?”

“I’m telling you, it’s downhill.”

“And if we don’t know how to transfer the fuel between tanks? Then I won’t be able to get back up.”

“You want gas, don’t you?”

She thought for a second.

�Ԩ���.”

“Well, come on.”

She started the car.

Very slowly, she began to follow the woman, staring at the bright spot of the flashlight leading the way, pointed at the ground. Down a dirt lane toward a house that emerged on the left after several minutes, and which appeared covered in the leaves or branches of several trees. Facing a potholed slope and enveloped in a darkness she wouldn’t know how to get out of.

The woman motioned for her to go even slower.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, coming over to the window.

“I just need a little gas. You wouldn’t have a can, would you?”

“You’re going to have to get out of there.”

At that point in the night, she was exhausted. She only just realized she had been breathing through her mouth for some time.

Waving her arms, the woman indicated where she should park, under a tree, where there were two other cars. Coro sighed and tried to calm herself. That woman was going to lend her a hand. She really was going to help her.

“Do you like the house? They say it was built by a single man.”

Just then, the lights came on in the first-floor windows and someone turned on a fluorescent outdoor bulb that completely illuminated the front of the house with an extraordinary white light.

“Some think all the lights should be left on, to discourage burglars. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s better if they don’t know we’re here.”

Coro couldn’t see her face because the woman had positioned herself against the light. She could see, however, that another woman was coming out of the house, headed in their direction, carrying something. Five or six dogs also appeared, circling Coro and sniffing her.

“You’re not afraid of dogs, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

The vagueness of the sky against the excessive light from the fluorescent bulb acted almost like a cupola. The place looked like a stage surrounded by trees.

“I’ve just taken it off the fire. Be careful.” The second woman handed Coro a mug, and she accepted it. It was scalding. It scorched her fingers. Her first impulse was to drop it. But she contained herself.

“C������ڳܱ�.”

“Shit!” she exclaimed.

The woman who gave her the mug made no expression whatsoever.

“Watch that mouth,” said the other.

“It’s boiling.”

She looked around for somewhere to set it down. In the company of those two women who watched her.

In an exercise of maximum self-control, after what seemed like hours, she set the mug on the hood of her car, spilling some of the liquid.

“Bring it here. I’ll hold it for you.”

“It’s boiling.”

“I warned you.”

“Nobody could drink that.”

“I warned you. We’ll wait until it cools.”

A nozzle hung from the side of the house, lit by the fluorescent bulb, fastened to the wall by a pipe and dripping a few centimeters from the bottom of a stone basin.

“Can I get some water?” she asked.

“It doesn’t work. Just drips.”

Coro brought her hands to mouth with the sensation that they were on fire. She went to the faucet and tried to turn it, but it was stuck.

“It doesn’t turn on or off. We told you.”

She brought her hands to her mouth again. They would be covered in blisters. She let the drops from the faucet wet her skin. She had hurt herself in the attempt to turn the lever and now her fingers shook.

A hoe and a rake were propped against the wall, beside the basin. And a wheelbarrow. The two women approached in silence, and when she turned around, she found them right behind her, fully illuminated by the fluorescent bulb. One had incredibly light brown eyes, almost golden, and the pair looked older now than she’d first imagined. They were slim and limber. They wore their hair pulled back and the same clothes, with identical boots. The same fabric for a pair of dresses equally threadbare and equally wrinkled. The woman who’d come from inside had put on a shawl.

Over their heads an immense tree grew. Carob, they told her.

“Can we try for the gas?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to come inside? Sit down and have a drink?”

“You’re not going to help me?”

“We are helping you.”

Coro looked at the dogs still circling her. Coming and going. Peeing on the flowerpots. At the base of the tree hugging the trunk, ringing it, a row of bowls, cups, and tin cans were tied together with string and containing water and scraps.

“For the cats.”

“They get on well with the dogs.”

Coro couldn’t care less whether or not they got on. Whether they ripped each other apart or ate each other up. Whether they tore out their eyes or chewed off hunks of flesh.

“What’s wrong? You’re not afraid of us, are you? You’re the one who turned up at our gate.”

“You made me drive down here.”

“If you’re looking for property, it’s better to see it during the day. The land. The lake.”

“I told you, I’m lost.”

“Right, but no one gets lost around here.”

“Do you think the broth will have cooled by now?” the first woman asked the second.

“Not broth, milk.”

“Do you like milk? Everyone likes milk, don’t they?”

“What’s your name?”

She answered and the women laughed.

“Coro? What kind of name is that? Where are you from?”

They told her the name didn’t exist and she thought that she should get back in the car. She always had that option. That blessed option. Only then would she be calmer. Getting into the car and locking the doors. Staying inside.

“You don’t want to come in?”

The two women watched her.

“You’re obviously tired.”

“Here. Drink.”

They handed her the mug again. Firmly. Coro brought it indecisively to her lips, but she drank. All of it. Asking herself how she could be there. How had she been able to leave her phone at home. What was happening to her.

It was still hot.

“Better? You feel better, don’t you?”

Did she feel better?

“Come on, relax a bit.”

“Do you want to come in?”

��by Pilar Adón & Katie Whittemore is available from (30% off before 12/1/24), , and better bookstores everywhere!

A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his��Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin,and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.Hisson,still a child,sitsat the foot of the bed, attentively collectingthesefinal,hallucinated words.

Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time,and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—h������asits source this ultimate paternal legacy?

Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatesbetween reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’sapproaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light.��An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts,and an evocation of a filial love,��Melvill��contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature’s most ambitious writers.

If you enjoy what you read below, you can from now until midnight PT on October 31st. (U.S. residents only, discount applied automatically at checkout.)

*

Now he knows he’s surrounded by everyone and everything, but he feels more alone than ever. Here, the perfect solitude of one outside but with no way out. Freezing but soon to burn, the fire of a fever already rising inside him. Speaking in smoldering, scorching tongues: sparking words that flame and name, far away and foreign to any warmth of home, to that home he’s dying—and where he’ll die—to return to.

Ready to be one more among so many memories. Wanting to be remembered like this. Epic in defeat. Broken but stronger than ever because there’s nothing left to break inside of him. Nothing to hide, all’s been revealed. All of him to everyone. Exposed to all and after all.

His name pronounced (mispronounced, emphasis on the ultimate syllable, foreignizing, Frenchifying it, making it more removed and, perhaps in that way, worthier of greater rejection) with a combination of shame and condemnation.

His name before a jury that would never dare find for him and, prejudging, would reach a unanimous verdict: “Young Wastrel of a Patrician Family,” and that’s the way—all-caps when written and��italics when spoken—people write about him in letters and speak about him at balls and banquets and masses.

Thus, his sentence to be served posthaste with no possibility of appeal or pardon. But here he is, still begging for someone to at least testify on his behalf and to write his story and to put him into words and, in a way, if not justify him then at least give him a modicum of redemption, a modicum of significance and purpose and reason to exist.

To be written.[1]

To be a being written (him being someone who more than once wished and dreamed he could write it all down and is already ready to transfer the acquittal of such a sentence) on empty and frozen pages like the waters he’s walking across now, barely keeping warm with the breathless breathing of dead supplications and unheard prayers. Messianic and miraculous, yes; but not like the Omnipotent and triumphant Creator on high but like a deity plummeting from higher still, in free fall, prisoner and fallen in his disgrace. His once divine voice no longer commanding, deafening, proof of love and respect but, trembling and weak, dwindling until it becomes a silent and flashing sacrifice he makes to himself. And, meanwhile, as he prepares his own execution ceremony, asking himself, without an answer, why (wasn’t this a distinctive trait of mortals? that almost last and willful gift of your whole life summarized in seconds and in reverse so you could understand it better or not bother? wasn’t that the explanation of the mystery of why so many people died with a Momma, Mommy, Ma on their lips?) all the people and things of this world that he loves or that don’t love him, the whole history of his story, now seemed to converge in this white darkness. Darkness he advances through, previously opaque and obscure and so late, suddenly without time and as if untethered from time, forever and ever, implacable and clean and transparent.

*

Record and file it, even if you prefer not to:

It’s the night of Saturday, December 10th, 1831, and Allan Melvill walks across the frozen waters of the Hudson River.

*

And, oh, when you walk on ice, on water in suspended animation, moods shift and thoughts are thought differently, Allan Melvill thinks. He thinks about how thoughts are thought with the most burning coolness. He thinks about how you think of anything other than that which, once deemed unthinkable, is, as such, impossible not to think about: about how that ice could break and about how, then, sinking to never again rise back up to that surface of superficialities to be ignored or attended to, you would cease to think forever. He thinks about the cold that freezes into crystals that bind together and break apart to separate and rise into the sky to then fall on the living and the dead in always different shapes.[2] With that cold that forces you to close your eyes to discover that, like certain lizards, you can see through your eyelids: his now almost sliced off by the freezing blade of the wild wind that whips his hair into disarray.

The same thing would happen (Allan Melvill thinks now, like he’s never thought before, thinking about what would be thought about or about what one would never dare to think about again but that, in the act refusing, one thinks about, thinking about how he once thought, afloat in a damning floating city of the damned) when we find a way to remain aloft, airborne and truly and joyfully displaced. When man can fly aboard marvelous machines (not just aerostatic balloons) whose sound will be like that of thousands of men clearing their throats after the morning’s first pipe. And with and in those machines, battles will be waged among the stars, and they’ll even make it to that fleeting moon, which, at this very moment, the clouds cover and uncover only to cover it again, and hurl down almost merciful white flakes of snow on Allan Melvill, as if they were soldiers laying siege to that defeated and humiliated deserter of the crucifying crusade of his own life.

But we’ve got a long way to go before that. Now, beneath his feet, that ice is the only solid thing left to hold him up, while around him and above him everything is thin ice in suspense, and the important thing is not to fly but to keep from falling or sinking or drowning.

Thus, in the dark, Allan Melvill remembers first; but then it’s as if he were dreaming, as if he were dreaming himself, or seeing himself from above. And he’d read somewhere that people who lived and wandered through landscapes of endless ices often felt that someone, their doppelgänger, was walking beside them (like that vanquished and enslaved memento-mori walking beside a triumphant Caesar or other victorious generals) and whispering in their ear the more than fifty names snow can be given, but not the names for each and every one of the infinite and always-different flakes that make up that snow and that, first, give the shape of snow to whatever they happen to come to rest upon and, then, to all the shapes they take after giving shape to the snow.

Then, suddenly, to the surprise and wonder of Allan Melvill, his whole life (his life as a father) is lived and relived, it melts away only to resolidify, like an invention invented by the boy who, though he would never theretofore have imagined it, has turned out to be the most inventive and imaginative of his children.[3]

[1] But no, not yet. It will be years before that happens: the sad masquerade of my father (there’s no need for me to wait for the revelations of a future yet-to-be-revealed science that will be dedicated to the interpretation of dreams and daydreams) rewritten wearing different masks like that of a riverway conman or that of a delusional captain or that of an incestuous decadent or that of a by-product of the Revolution or that of a more confusing than confused pale-gray colored scrivener, among many others. And it will be even longer before I comment on it from here: from the marine and oceanic depths of these pages en route to the last and final shore. Me holding and losing my breath; because nothing is more exhausting than swimming upstream, taking in air, in pursuit of the always forgetful founts of memory.

[2] Imagine a book always at high sea. A book adrift and drifting in swirling digressions and dodging not icebergs of small tips and massive bottoms but compact glaciers that have as much to show as to hide. A book that is nothing but a perpetual draft, because every book is never-ending. A book that is the draft of a sketch; because the smallest constructions can be completed by their original architects; while the largest, the truest, always leave the conclusion on the tallest rooftops to fix and secure there the posterity of whoever reads them beyond the one who wrote it.

My case, without looking any further.

[3] His light casts my shadow. The one is the eclipse of the other. I, at his feet, will tell what he, lying there, tells me. He is bound and I’m bound to him; and I trust that all the information that I’ll offer has, moreover, some literary and dramatic value, beyond the tragedy and sorrow of the events that keep that man prostrate here. Thus, I shall send my indefinable imagination (truly the most exact of sciences) off to hunt and track and catch the facts. And then, flay and eviscerate them, as once upon a time I did whales. To those whales that, as the years pass, seem to me more and more the product of youth’s liquid dream. Always taking care to keep their stomach gasses from bursting and covering me with guts and blood and excrement. And to keep from spilling that illuminating sperm of the truth that, once processed, will be irreconcilable as something that happened but, at the same time, will be read (will be read by the light of candles and oil derived from that same whale sperm) as something even truer than it ever was. Reality only becomes really real after crossing the stormy sea of art and arriving safe and sound to the other shore. Not while we live it or write it, but later, when we read it; and only then does everything become logical and inevitable and we ask ourselves how we failed to see it or see it coming.

Thus, everything that one invents ends up (or starts out) being true and, taking place, ends up having taken place to thereby begin to take place.

by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden is available in better bookstores everywhere on October 8, 2024, and available at 30% off (until 11/1/2024) on the .��

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.

*

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 Río��’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 (, , )

*

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 (, , )

*

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 (, , )

*

Enjoy!

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

Today’s #WITMonth post is an except from

Here’s the jacket copy:

Subtly in the vein of��Dogville��or Coetzee’s��Disgrace, and invoking the works of Agota Kristof,��Un Amor��probes ideas of language, alienation, and community through the eyes of a woman who, when brought into conflict, finds herself on the potential brink of deeper awareness of herself and her place in the world.

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in La Escapa, an arid rural village in Spain’s interior. She settles into a small, shabby house with cheap rent to begin work on her first literary translation, with a skittish and ill-tempered dog—a gift from the boorish landlord—her only company.

Burdened with assumptions about country life, Nat will enter into relationships with the handful of local inhabitants—her negligent landlord, Píter the hippie, the dementia-afflicted Roberta, the young city family who comes on weekends, the unsociable man they call “The German”—from whom she appears to receive a customary welcome.

Mutual misunderstanding and a persistent sense of alienation, however, thrum below the surface. And when conflicts arise over repairs to the house, Nat receives an offer and makes a crucial decision.

In prose as taut and oppressive as the atmosphere in La Escapa,��Un Amor��extends Mesa’s exploration of language and power, confronting readers with the limits of their own morality as tensions mount and the community’s most unexpected impulses emerge.

This book—like so many of Mesa’s—is a slow burn, with tension increasing with every event, every turn of the page. The except below is from the first section of the book, setting the scene, introducing a few key characters, and creating the atmosphere of this part of rural Spain. Enjoy!

Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

She’d be hard pressed to come up with a convincing answer if asked to explain what she was doing there. That’s why she hedges when the time comes, babbling about a change of scenery.

“People must think you’re crazy, right?”

The cashier smacks gum as she piles Nat’s shopping on the counter. It’s the only store in a few-mile radius, an unmarked establishment where foodstuffs and hygiene products accumulate in a jumble. Shopping there is expensive and the pickings are slim, but Nat is reluctant to take the car to Petacas. She rummages in her wallet and counts out the bills she needs.

The girl from the shop is in a chatty mood. Brazen, she asks Nat all about her life, flustering her. The girl wishes she could do what Nat’s done, but the opposite, she says. Move to Cárdenas, where stuff actually happens.

“Living here sucks. There aren’t even any guys!”

She tells Nat that she used to go to high school in Petacas, but she dropped out. She doesn’t like studying, she’s crap at every subject. Now she helps out in the shop. Her mom gets chronic migraines, and her dad also does some farming, so she lends a hand at the store. But as soon as she turns eighteen, she’s out of there. She could be a cashier in Cárdenas, or a nanny. She’s good with kids. The few kids who ever make it to La Escapa, she smiles.

“This place sucks,” she repeats.

It’s the girl who tells Nat about the people living in the surrounding houses and farms. She tells her about the gypsy family squatting in a dilapidated farmhouse, right near the ramp for the highway. A bus picks up the kids every morning; they’re the only kids who live in La Escapa year-round. And there’s the old couple in the yellow house. The woman is some kind of witch, the girl claims. She can predict the future and read your mind.

“She’s a little crazy, so it’s creepy,” the girl laughs.

She tells Nat about the hippie in the wooden house, and the guy they call “The German” even though he isn’t from Germany, and Gordo’s bar—though to call the storehouse where they serve up bottles of beer a bar is, she admits, a bit of an exaggeration. There are other people who come and go according to the rhythms of the countryside, dayworkers hired for two-week stints or just the day, but also whole families who have inherited houses they can’t manage to sell and who live somewhere else half the year. But you never see women on their own. Not women Nat’s age, she specifies.

“Old ladies don’t count.”

During the first days, Nat gets confused and mixes up all that information, partly because she’d listened absently, partly because she’s in unfamiliar territory. La Escapa’s borders are blurry, and even though there is a relatively compact cluster of small houses—where hers is located—other buildings are scattered farther off, some inhabited and others not. From the outside, Nat can’t tell whether they’re homes or barns, if there are people inside or just livestock. She loses her bearings on the dirt roads and if it weren’t for the shop—which sometimes feels more familiar to her than the house she’s rented and slept in for a week—as a point of reference, she’d feel lost. The area isn’t even very pretty, although at sunset, when the edges soften and the light turns golden, she finds a kind of beauty she can cling to.

Nat takes her grocery bags and says goodbye to the girl. But before she exits the shop, she turns back and asks about the landlord. Does the girl know him? The girl purses her lips, shakes her head slowly. No, not really, she says. He’s lived in Petacas for a long time.

“But I do remember seeing him around here when I was little. He always had a pack of dogs and a really bad temper. Then he got married, or got together with someone, and left. I guess his wife didn’t want to live in La Escapa—can’t blame her. This place is worse for girls. Even though Petacas is nothing special—I wouldn’t want to live there either, no way.”

*

Sara Mesa

She tries to play with the dog, tossing him an old ball she found in the woodpile. But instead of catching it and bringing it back, the dog limps away. When she crouches down next to him, putting herself on his level so he won’t be afraid, he skulks off with his tail between his legs. The dog is a piece of work, she thinks, a real rotter. Sieso, they’d call him in the part of Spain she comes from. It seems a good a name as any—after all, she has to call him something. It certainly describes his surly nature. But Sieso is as inscrutable as he is unsociable. He hangs around, but it’s like he wasn’t there at all. Why should she have to settle for a dog like that? Even the little dog in the shop, an extremely anxious Chihuahua mix, is much nicer. All the dogs she meets on the roads—and there are tons of them—run over when she calls. A lot of them are looking to be fed, of course, but also to be pet; they are nosy and curious, wanting to know who this new girl in the neighborhood is. Sieso doesn’t even seem interested in eating. If she feeds him, great, and if not, that’s fine too. The landlord wasn’t kidding: the animal’s upkeep is cheap. Sometimes Nat is ashamed of the aversion she feels toward the animal. She asked for a dog and here he is. Now she cannot—must not—say—or even think—that she doesn’t want him.

One morning at the shop, she meets the hippie, as the girl called him. Now she languidly waits on them both, smoking a cigarette with no sense of urgency. The hippie is a little older than Nat, though he can’t be more than forty. Tall and strong, his skin is weathered by the sun, his hands broad and cracked, his eyes hard but placid. He wears his hair long in a terrible cut and his beard is on the reddish side. Why the girl calls him “hippie” is something Nat can only guess. Maybe it’s his long hair or because he is someone who, like Nat, comes from the city, a stranger, something incomprehensible for anyone who has lived in La Escapa since childhood and can only think of getting away. The truth is, the hippie has lived there a long time. He is, therefore, nothing novel, not like Nat. She observes him from the corner of her eye, his efficient movements, concise and confident. As she waits her turn, she pats the back of the dog he has brought with him. She’s a chocolate Labrador, old but undeniably elegant. The dog wags her tail and noses Nat’s crotch. The three of them laugh.

“What a good girl,” Nat says.

The hippie nods and holds out his hand. Then he changes his mind, withdraws it and moves in to kiss her. Just one kiss on the cheek, which causes Nat to remain with her face tilted, waiting for the second kiss that doesn’t come. He tells her his name: Píter. With an i, he specifies: P-í-t-e-r. At least that’s how he likes to spell it, except when he’s forced to write it officially. The less one writes one’s real name, the better, he jokes. It’s only good for signing checks at the bank, for those thieves.

“Natalia,” she introduces herself.

Then comes the obligatory question: what is she doing in La Escapa? He’s seen her out on the trails and also saw her tidying up the area around the house. Is she going to live there? Alone? Nat feels awkward. She would prefer that nobody watch her while she works, especially without her knowledge, which is inevitable because the boundaries of the property are marked only by fine wire mesh, denuded of vegetation. She tells him she’s only staying a couple of months.

“I’ve seen the dog, too. You got him here, right?”

“How do you know?”

Píter confesses that he knows the animal. One of the landlord’s many. That dog, in fact, is probably the worst of the lot. Her landlord will pick them up wherever, doesn’t train them, doesn’t vaccinate them, doesn’t care for them in the slightest. He uses, then abandons, them. Did she ask for the dog? She can be sure the landlord has given her the most useless one he had.

Nat considers this and the man suggests she give the dog back. There’s no reason to settle if he isn’t what she wanted. The landlord isn’t a good guy, he says, she’s better off keeping her distance. He doesn’t like to speak badly of anyone, he insists, but the landlord is another matter. Always thinking about how to scam people.

“I can get you a dog if you want.”

The conversation leaves Nat uneasy. Sitting on her doorstep with a lukewarm bottle of beer—the fridge, too, is on the fritz—she watches Sieso sleeping beside the fence, stretched out in the sunshine. The flies loiter on his slightly swollen belly, where the marks of old wounds are visible.

The thought of returning him is deeply unsettling.

*

Katie Whittemore

She is surprised by the activity in Petacas. It takes her a while to find parking; the layout of the roads is so chaotic and the signage so contradictory that once you enter the town, an unexpected detour can easily take you right out of it again. The houses are modest, their façades worse for the wear and mostly plain, but there are brick buildings, too, up to six stories tall, distributed arbitrarily here and there. The businesses are clustered around the main square; the town hall—an ostentatious building with large eaves and stained-glass windows—is surrounded by small bars and Chinese-owned bazaars. Nat buys a small fan at one of them. Then she wanders in search of a hardware store, reluctant to ask for directions. She is struck by the neglected appearance of the women, who have left the house with unkempt hair and slip-on sandals. Many of the men—even the old ones—are in sleeveless shirts. The few children she sees are unsupervised, licking popsicles, scampering, rolling on the ground. The people—men, women, kids—all of whom are loud and sloppy, look strangely alike. Inbreeding, Nat thinks. Her landlord is a perfect fit.

She worries about running into him, but it’s Píter, not the landlord, whom she meets in the hardware store. She is happy to see him: someone she knows, someone friendly, someone smiling at her at last, coming over, what are you doing here, he asks. Nat shows him the box with the fan and he scowls. Why didn’t she ask the landlord? It’s his responsibility to keep the property in habitable condition. Not air conditioning, obviously, but a fan at least.

“Or you could have asked me. That’s what neighbors are for.”

Nat looks for an excuse. She’s happy to buy one, she says. She’ll take it with her when she leaves La Escape. Píter looks at her askance, pretending not to believe her.

“And what are you buying here? Tools to fix everything he left broken?”

Nat shakes her head.

“No. Stuff for the garden.”

“You’re planting a garden?”

“Well, just something basic . . . Peppers and eggplants, they’re easy, I guess. I want to try, at least.”

Píter takes her by the arm, steps closer.

“Don’t buy anything,” he whispers.

He tells her that he can lend her all the tools she needs. He says, too, that she might as well forget about a garden. Nothing’s grown on her land in years; the soil is totally depleted; it would take days and days of hard work to get it into shape. If she insists—Nat hangs on that word, insists—he could lend her a hand, but he absolutely advises against it. Although he speaks smoothly, Píter’s voice contains indisputable sureness, an expert’s confidence. Nat nods, waits for him to finish his shopping. Cables, adaptors, screws, a pair of pliers: all very professional, very specific, nothing at all like the indefiniteness in which she operates.

Outside, Píter walks beside her at an athletic pace, straight but flexible. His way of moving is so elegant, so different from the people around them, that Nat is proud to be walking next to him, the sort of pride associated with feeling legitimate. The spell breaks when he points to the windows at the town hall.

“Pretty, aren’t they? I made them.”

Nat thinks the windows clash terribly with the building’s exposed brick, but she is all praise: they suit it perfectly, she says. Píter looks at her appreciatively. Precisely, he says, that’s what he seeks, for his work to befit its context.

“Petacas isn’t the nicest place in the world, but—to the extent possible—one should strive to beautify one’s surroundings, don’t you think?”

“So, you’re a . . .” Nat doesn’t know what you call a person who makes stained-glass windows.

“A glazier? Yes. Well, more than a glazier. A glass and color artisan, you might say. Like, I don’t just cover windows.”

“Of course.” Nat smiles.

They have a beer in one of the bars on the square. The beer is ice-cold and goes down easy. Píter observes her closely—too closely, she thinks—but his eyes are sweet and that softens her discomfort. The conversation returns to the landlord—that cheeky bastard, he repeats—the tools and her barren plot. He insists on lending her what she needs. Just a matter of tidying the yard, clearing space for a table and some lawn chairs, then planting a few oleander and yucca, or some succulents suitable for the harsh climate. There’s a huge nursery near Petacas, very cheap. If she wants, one day they can go together. It seems her plans for a vegetable garden have been scrapped. She doesn’t mention them again.

Again Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an excerpt from Mexican author Karla Marrufo’s Flame Trees in May,��translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese. Here’s a description of the book:

“There are stories that cannot help but change us forever, and Mayo, with its showers of golden rain, its flame trees on fire, its dark sun and the drips and drops that form bubbles, is one of them.”—Nidia Cuan

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula.��Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

Flame Trees in May is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.��

And, as an editorial note, the layout of this novella is much closer to poetry than to prose. I’ve tried to represent it as best as possible in this post, but I highly recommend reading the physical book for a better sense of how this is supposed to appear on the page.

*

did you know there’s a word in portuguese that resembles your name?

i’ve forgotten it now, but it means mementos or memories, like remembering to send greetings to someone, to send a memo. i would remember it if only i could pet the cat, just like i would remember to take out the trash on friday and to close the refrigerator door

the door to my tears,

and all the windows before leaving the house.

so much silence here. have you noticed? that when you keep quiet, the house gets dirtier so much faster? you are such stubborn dust. you pass through doorways and come to settle in corners kept under lock and key. maybe that’s why lola can’t stand this place

the room still sweats with the warm hypocrisy from when it was a law office

and i’ll tell you why, if we keep going like this, soon we’ll be able to rent it out as a funeral parlor. that’s a profitable business. people will never stop dying

or keeping quiet

or thinking today must be friday.

Karla Marrufo

come here. touch the wall. it’s covered in dark bubbles. so humid! the wood is swelling. i am swelling, and sometimes i feel myself rolling, floating, rolling—like those days when we’d go to the park and roll down the hill until we were exhausted, until we would land at the base of the hill where the grass was peaceful and green. remember? we spent so many weekends at that park! we arrived with our childish excitement, believing everything was going to be fine; we ate sandwiches and sipped fruit juice while the clowns blew up dog-shaped balloons

the dogs walking by were shaped like balloons that would later pop—

once blown up to full size and left to bloat at the side of the road, the cars never stopping.

but in those days, bubbles were clear, and everything was fine. we should return to that city again sometime, leave this flat landscape for a while.

have you noticed how tiresias looks at me? i’ve often wondered what he’s thinking when his little green eyes grow big and stare into mine. it reminds me of that movie

what was it called?

the one where they ask whether, instead of us being the ones who make animals more human, it’s not the opposite way around, that the creatures in our lives turn us into animals. later lola brought up that song again, the one about the professor who teaches puppies how to write

he was an animal lover for sure; a regular zoophile, lola said

what a silly song! it makes me laugh,

though my excitement lasts an instant

as i think about those animals

those bubbles

and how they drift through life with their broken fragments of memory.

so little time has passed, really, and yet i’ve started mixing things up; things disappear from my mind. sometimes the past is a faded beach house, condemned each day to endure the relentless caress of sand and the sting of salt swept in by the wind. lola insists i take vitamins, fish oil, seaweed capsules. she says i should sleep more

have peaceful dreams, sleep without needles pounding in my temples

for eight, ten hours

a thousand hours

to sleep forever

but a wicked sun keeps visiting me in my dreams, drawing black holes before my eyes

it wakes me—agitated—every forty minutes.

i saw it on tv. the blonde girl with the small mouth was talking about it: about the very dark spot at the center of a solar flare. you have to see it

we should talk more. a little more. you know? it’s easier to remember ordinary things that happen to us when we talk about them. that’s why names are so important

a handful of letters from the alphabet, bound to the heart our whole lifes.

mamá panchita used to repeat this ad nauseam.

she said names are very dangerous; they chart the lines that lead to our destinies.

i remember the last time, so sad, though it barely lasted a few seconds. we had bound mamá panchita’s hands with a rope, secured them to the ceiling beams, so she would stop

she was only hurting herself;

scratching open her skin as a way to remember.

her hands restless as kites,

but without the colors

and i was deeply moved by her dark skin. seeing it touched me in a way that no one else’s skin had ever moved me before. it smelled ancient, the scent of many years. doubt had left a deep crease between her eyebrows. in a corner of the room, right in front of her, the small altar to our lady of charity was laughing along with five freshly cut sunflowers and the sparkle of a few fake coins. eyes half-closed, mamá panchita squinted suspiciously as she observed the saint; her pupils glowering with the hatred of a thousand questions answered only by whispers.

and just as i walked into the room, an unspeakable anger seized me

she was scratching open her skin

who knows what she was looking for below the surface

that’s why she had all those sores on her arms,

that long scar on her face

and her terrifying screams and outrage made me shake with anger and then grow quiet because, there at her side for the last time, i felt incapable of speaking to her

come now, mamá, everything’s going to be fine. when i look into your eyes, there you are—so very much yourself, mamá, always you, taking the little thread of your name, that’s about to break

nothing. silence. in that quiet corner of the room, i didn’t so much as dare to light the white candles around our lady of charity; we kept still, our mouths sealed

by our dark hands.

when it comes to giving me looks, even tiresias is more expressive than that. this must be why he scratches me with such determination. you see? it’s the same thing backwards. relentless caresses and reverberating silences—and this house didn’t even suffer the misfortune of having been built near the ocean. it has survived for years in mamá panchita’s absence

in the absence of your sisters, your father, you,

and me

only the bubbles and drops remain

drip, drop

of a rather thick liquid, as if flooded by disappointment, muddied by a sadness that makes everything slippery. no matter how hard i try, i can’t stop pacing between these same drops of music, these same notes, this same smell that comes, always, in may

it’s may again

that clings to the walls of memory, climbing the walls like a vine, working its way into the memories hidden in every corner, embroidered with the threads of mamá panchita’s name. she was fascinated by fancy paper napkins, by the little drawings on disposable cups, the tiny flowers on plastic cutlery—so many treasures. remember? she ate with her hands instead of touching the plastic forks, cleaned her mouth using her sleeves instead of napkins, discreetly wiped her fingertips on the edge of the tablecloth—all to preserve the beauty of disposable things.

you see, i’m still finding her trove of plastic and paper at the most unexpected moments, in the most unexpected places, and this creates a dilemma for me because i never know what to do with these disposable objects she left untouched only to be thrown out later, nobody giving them a second thought.

do you know how many things vanish without anyone so much as thinking of them? i try to do it, to think about every single thing, about every person who dies . . . but there are far too many and i am

it seems to me

much too small. maybe when you start thinking about things, the things themselves become sad too. like the melon this morning. lola brought it, and it was gigantic, a really big one, and i had to cut through the rind myself, then scoop out the seeds from each little square—the hulls of those seeds rough to the touch as I removed them; each unique and alive, and they covered my hands like homicidal blood. and there wasn’t even running water in the house

no drip, no drop

and that meant my hands were coated in the melon’s sweet round death, its juice running onto the floor until finally i cried—knife in hand—about all the times i hadn’t known how to relish the thought of death.

*

where are you going? did you know there’s a greek word . . . ?

but i took out the trash on friday and closed all the doors

all of them

though later i opened them again because i needed to let in the daylight and to breathe in the outside world. sometimes when the sun

a spot black as night

starts to scribble on the walls and furniture in my room, i force myself awake: but it’s no use. my eyes keep me anchored in sleep. my eyelids stay closed, inwardly, looking for a long time at a universe that lacks the contours drawn for us by daylight. that’s why i have to open the windows and doors, expand this space so the colors don’t stay hidden, so i, too, may draw myself for one more day. it’s strange: all of a sudden i start to imagine my own funeral, among dark bubbles, in this ridiculous heat. and i’m afraid,

of closed doors and windows

very afraid. i must be lost in the maze of cereal boxes and energy shakes. every morning the same routine, so easy to follow that in the end i get lost. it’s easy to get lost when you go about your day only pretending to be free

to have no blood at all.

and you know it. remember when we would get lost and promise each other we would never go home? never return again,

to the smoothies or fish oil or seaweed

even though the way home was a straight shot, no turns. we wanted to run away to the parks with their hills and lakes

do you remember?

Allison A. deFreese

to sail far away from home, balloons that rise until they touch the sky. we were happy runaways, glancing over our shoulders, feeling above it all and looking down on those small lives below . . . exactly the way life looked from the picture window at the italian restaurant. remember that place? its crystal-clear windows under the shade of a ceiba tree, where i waited for you, hidden inside, imagining the instant you would arrive? the ceilings in that space were as high as our sky. sometimes when you arrived, i would imagine you were someone else, a different fellow coming to see me. then we’d escape with our foolish fantasies that i cherish to this day

you are so silly, small woman!

you ramble on and on, you can’t hold your tongue; with a warm, sweet venom in your saliva

i am quite small for being such a silly woman

with the eagerness of a schoolgirl and a trembling desire to see you again, i loved waiting for you. and when you triumphantly entered the restaurant, you grinned, confirmed what you suspected, and then kept playing our game, hiding a rose behind your back

a forbidden caress

fixing your gaze on my body

later putting the flower in my hands without a word

what a lovely couple

yes, mamá, we make such a lovely couple, though tiresias may condemn us

with his intense green gaze and his claws on our skin.

yes, it sounds so pretty, but neither of us were destined to be martyrs, nor would our deaths be foreshadowed by ripping open our consciousness, little by little each day, in an italian restaurant

or by having someone read of a very long will and testament:

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��the one who dies first, dies best

we didn’t think about death back then, even though in those days we knew already that neither words nor names would ever be on our side. remember the letters we wrote each other, the tongue twisters, all the wordplay?

paradise bird white angel cloud heaven dream blood

and what does blood have in common with dreams?

they are connected in the same way that paradise is full of birds and angels: you must fly to reach paradise, just as there must be blood for a dream to end

and i laughed then, though i never understood a thing. because to me, you were as bright as the look of hope in a street dog’s eyes.

wait! you would have loved it in the city center yesterday, everyone was there. i walked and walked, past all the shops, among people and pigeons. it was fascinating. it was strange, getting lost in a crowd again. a thousand colors overlapping, dust in the air, the excitable sounds of people in a hurry, with their purchases and their sniveling kids holding melting ice creams, sad from the heat. and a man looked at me like no man has looked at me for many years.

i felt paralyzed and dry, a scarecrow of a woman. except that i can’t scare anything, not even pigeons. i couldn’t return his look, because i could tell he was someone who refused to be intimidated. i felt trapped like the queen in a game of chess, alone and vulnerable at the moment of defeat. i would like to learn to play chess

to find my way out of mazes

to fill myself with the power of knives

but no one will tell me how it’s done. i never learned to return a look. i know nothing about revenge. that must be why everything around me ends up dying or getting killed. you know, tiresias spent the night in the carport again. i’m afraid i will forget him, that he’ll forget about me. i am very afraid that one day we will both forget about each other—that i’ll drive out of the carport and he won’t move; and after that, he’ll never run away or come to me again; that later i’ll have to wipe up his blood and gently remove his little red collar from his neck, and place the drop that was his body

dark as a bubble

in a trash bag that i won’t forget to take out on friday. maybe after that, i’ll close the doors forever.

go on then. you can leave if you want. there’s nothing here anymore. that’s why we are so backward and rustic, so broken down—at a standstill. we lack the words to communicate, even those words that conspire against us, that aren’t on our side.

sometimes, i have the feeling a man is watching us, staring, lewd and hateful, and what no one realizes is that we are actually alone in this world, and no one can form the shapes of our eyes

of our skin, of our memories

as if not one beautiful thing remained, and only a little of the bad, the exact size and shape of our hearts

which become a little less small every day,

gets embedded in our hands and feet

did i tell you? tiresias killed a hummingbird

angel bird heaven paradise

and is tearing it apart now, licking it, dropping it at my feet as an offering of sacrifice. he’s a hunter because he can kill, because that swift flutter of wings makes no difference to him, nor does he care if a shooting pain stabs the heart as his little whiskered mouth shreds the warm body and throbbing heartbeat of a bird that was about to take flight. i also know how to heal wounds just like those, death wounds.

tiresias has killed another hummingbird. nothing ever changes! it’s like he fills his mouth with death so as not to hiss at our sins. we should play again

another paradise another crow another angel another cat another pair of wings

but without the terror of these days that now keep us apart. if we stay quiet, if we speak very quietly and tell each other new secrets, things could be like they were before. look closely . . . if you can just ignore my slurred speech and the way i drag my ��’s in every phrase—such an effort to form that sound— everything will be exactly the same as it has always been. you only need to make me repeat it over and over again

she sells seashells she sells seashells she sells seashells

and everything

everything

will be the same again.

Available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

Officially out last Tuesday,

From the recent :

Below is an excerpt—translated by Katie Whittemore, whose translation of this novel is as ambitious and admirable as the book itself—from a section when Juan is approaching the US-Mexico border, and is in a place like Ciudad Juarez.

You can purchase ��from better bookstores everywhere, , , or .

*

Juan opens his eyes in the dark, not waking completely. He stays like that for a time, on the edge of his dream. He’s on the train, he thinks at first. And then: I’ve fallen off the train, the train has run over my legs, my arms, my head. He is surprised to be alive, if that darkness isn’t actually death. I’m dreaming, he thinks. I’m in Navaja’s car. I’m in the Chichimeca desert. On his horse. In the arms of the Little Widow. In the arms of my wife. Then he perceives the faint outline of square window, and on the other side, the red and yellow lights of automobiles speeding past on the highway. Much more slowly, memories return to him, in ambiguous waves. He feels along the wall until he encounters what turns out to be a switch and the light from the lamp blinds him like the flash of a gunshot. Gradually he comes into a heavy, viscous awareness of his surroundings. The lamp. The vase where the same withered flowers languish. The bed, his bed, immune to the train’s violent jerking and his horse’s trot. Finally, he remembers, or decides he remembers. Everything is calm. Only the same rhythmic sound persists; not the Beast’s vibration, but a hand knocking on his door.

He stands to open that door.

He sees a very young woman on the other side. A girl whose childhood. has been diligently erased, with deep red lipstick and dabs of makeup. She has a bottle of tequila in one hand and two small glasses in the other. A certain expression of neglect. Her eyes shine with a light that is at once familiar and remote.

“Can I come in, papaíto?”

She can. She does so, slowly, hesitant, with her too-short skirt, flesh-colored bra, and swing of her cheap earrings. She sets the bottle and glasses on the night table and then turns to him with something that isn’t quite determination but aspires to be.

“You’re not going to sit?”

Because she is already sitting on the bed, on the very edge of the bed, as if she would like to occupy as little space as possible. Juan is still standing, his hand on the door handle, looking at the girl’s bare legs. Her hands, so small, as if created to hold a piece of art. Her white throat. In some ways, she reminds him of the women he saw advertised from the train, depicted on huge signs on both sides of the train track; women who were stunningly beautiful but also a little faded, mistreated by the elements.

“They call me the Güerita,” the Güerita says.

“I’m Juan.”

“I know. They told me you’d be waiting for me.”

He waits a few moments before closing the door. Then he sits down beside the girl. He opens the bottle and fills both glasses. The girl accepts hers in silence; her hands don’t meet around the glass. She isn’t even looking at it. Her eyes have just discovered the book on the night table, open to the Padrote’s page.

“You know him?”

The Güerita is about to reply, but in the end says nothing. Her eyes are fixed on him again, with an intensity that might be confused for fear. Eyes very open but simultaneously afraid, as if they were plumbing the depths of a well. At first, Juan doesn’t catch the significance of that look.

“Am I so like him?”

She nods slightly. The glass doesn’t quite make it to her lips.

“Navaja says you’re brothers.”

“H������-�����dzٳ�����.”

They drink from their glasses at the same time. Between them, a silence has opened, made not only from a few centimeters of mattress, but from minutes or centuries of distance.

“He was the one who brought you here, right?” Juan asks.

�Ԩ���.”

Juan takes another drink, long and full, to decide what he needs to ask.

“Did he force you?”

She shakes her head so vigorously she almost spills. No, no he didn’t force her. The Padrote, his brother, his half-brother that is, is a good man. If she’s there, it’s because it’s her choice; she wants to make that clear. She entered prostitution with all five senses, nobody forced her. She was looking for an opportunity to earn some pesos and the Padrote gave it to her. How could that be bad?

“You’re here because you want to be.”

�Ԩ���.”

The girl takes another swig of tequila. It’s a long swig, deliberate, long enough to decide what she is going to say next.

“The Padrote is a good man,” she repeats.

*

Juan Gómez Bárcena

The girl’s life encompasses twenty-one years—or that’s what the girl says, at least, although she doesn’t look more than eighteen—and takes as long to be recounted as the time she needs to empty three glasses of tequila. She talks about herself this way sometimes, in the third person, as if hers was a story she could better understand from a distance or from greater heights. Maybe this is why it doesn’t exactly seem to be a person’s life, but a chronicle of a character who never existed or the obituary of a girl already dead. There are, as in all the stories Juan has heard, certain common elements. The south. A birthplace that was poor or hungry or wretched. To the north, a drain that swallows up everything it touches, first her papa, then her mama; later, her older and younger siblings. One day, the gravitational force of that drain would end up catching her, too. She was eighteen at the time, although it seems to Juan that when the girl says twenty-one she means eighteen and fifteen when she says eighteen. Before setting off, she was told to leave behind anything that could identify her at home, so goodbye passport, library card, bills. Even shopping receipts. She was also told to neutralize her accent, because then there was no way to find out where she came from, and they’d have nowhere to deport her to. She followed those instructions to a T, and now nobody can guess her nationality. Try if you don’t believe me, papa.to, she says. Don’t know? Her clients often try, and they almost always fail. Guatemala, they say. Salvador, Honduras. They’ve even taken her for Argentine. And she says: Nope, nope, nope. But I’m going to tell you, papaíto. I’m Nicaraguan. From Managua. But only to you: to the police, I’m pure Mexican. Although if she really thinks about it, she says, staring into her glass, what is pure Mexican? What purity is there in anything, if we’re not talking about pure heroin or purebred dogs, which, by the way, die sooner the purer they are. Well. They told her not to take anything and nothing was what she took. Nothing except a few hundred dollars in her socks, and a suitcase with a change of clothes and a Virgin of Guadalupe prayer card. She packed the prayer card face up, so the Virgen could breathe. And the journey had its setbacks and its small tragedies; not all of those who accompanied her had the same luck, but thanks to God nothing happened to her, the Beast was good to her, maybe it respected her because she prayed a lot to the Virgin or maybe—and it scares her to think this—it was nothing but chance, plain and simple. The fact is she reached the border in ten or twelve days, safe and sound and with most of the dollars still balled up in her left sock. But in the end, it turned out she didn’t have enough for the crossing; the prices changed year to year, and in the previous eighteen months, the polleros’ fees had gone up: supply and demand, sister, they told her, this is America, this is the free market. And so she tried—unsuccessfully— to climb the border wall, along with two guys who also didn’t have the money to pay the pollero. And then they tried to swim across the Río Bravo—successfully, in a sense, because even though she didn’t manage to reach the other side, she didn’t drown either, not like one of the boys did. It was in that moment, soaked to the bone and shaking, when she decided to give up the dream, or a specific part of the dream, and settled down right here. In this city that kisses the border with El Paso and from that kiss, from that species of encounter or chat or intercourse between the two cities, nothing good is born. A city with a gentleman’s name, but that was better suited to the name of a murdered female, and there are so many to choose from. Of course, back then she didn’t know anything about this city, nothing about the murdered women, nothing, really, about almost anything. The worst thing about poverty, the girl says, is that it’s not just your pockets that are empty, but your head, too. It costs money to know certain things. And she had nothing, knew nothing, just what was advertised on TV, that Coca-Cola is life and that it’s a good time for the great taste of McDonald’s; that Vicente Fox is the change you need and Felipe Calderón wants you to catch his passion for México and you know that Peña Nieto will deliver. Because advertising, the girl says, is free. It might be the only free thing in this world. Anyway. She arrived in this city whose name she doesn’t want to remember with very little, with a couple hundred dollars and the address of her sister-in-law’s friend written on the back of a flyer. Her sister-in-law’s friend took her in as best she knew and could manage. The next day, that woman got her a job at one of the city’s textile factories. Because sewing was among the few things the girl knew how to do. There, in that sort of stable or hothouse or mammoth cathedral, where all the people were women, bent over their sewing machines, strafing scraps of yellow canvas. It was so bright indoors that outside always looked like night. Very white light, like a highway gasworks. Or a hospital waiting room. Or the front window of a cafeteria open twenty-four hours. In fact, the factory was open twenty-fours a day, and inside you could eat lunch, shower, even work out in a kind of gym. When she earned enough, the girl told herself, she would cross the border. And that, earning enough, might still take a few months, because the pay was, shall we say, somewhere between low and really low, but her sister-in-law’s friend told her no, they couldn’t complain, especially considering what was going on. The girl, who knew nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather she believed something in a blind and irrational way, a way she herself couldn’t explain. She knew things had always been bad. And that they would continue to be bad. And that the poor would continue to find reasons not to complain. She was poor and—in accordance with her own theory—she didn’t complain. Besides, what was there to complain about, what with the trimestral bonuses for employees and labor conventions, her sister-in-law’s friend recited, impassioned; there were prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, employee of the month, employee of the week, social security, free uniform laundry service; they took out a life insurance policy for you while you were alive and paid for your funeral if, God forbid, you died. It was enough for the girl because the girl was going to leave. But between leaving and not leaving, while she machine-gunned scraps of yellow canvas in that stable or cathedral or hothouse, while she shared a mattress in a shared room in a shared apartment, while those things were happening, she says, other things were happening that she disregarded, at least in the beginning. There were tiny notices in the papers, between the crime section and the horoscopes. Flyers pasted on bus shelters or streetlights, and on them the faces and names of very young girls. Girls who weren’t old enough. Old enough for what? What does she know, old enough to be alone, to be lost; to be, basically, all blurry in a black and white photograph, as if their own disappearance had caught them off guard. It’s true that, in time, all or almost all of them turned up, poor things, mutilated and dirty with dust and blood, abandoned in the empty lots in Lomas de Poleo or the landfills of Santa Elena or the Cerro Bola hillside, under a jumbo inscription written in whitewash that said READ THE BIBLE. Just like that, in the imperative: Read the Bible. They turned up around there, and the newspaper devoted the same tiny space to them again, only now they were a female cadaver, and in the days following the press release someone, merciful or pragmatic, went around taking down the flyers with those photos that looked like they’d been taken for a First Communion. Other times, other bodies turned up, bodies no one identified or claimed, women for whom nobody had put up posters, and then the press release was even smaller. This is awful, I would say to my sister-in-law’s friend, the girl says, although it’s probably fairer to say that by that time she was not so much the sister-in-law’s friend as her own. The girl’s. What’s awful? the friend would ask. Well, the stuff about those poor little girls. And she, the girl’s friend, would gesture with whatever she had in her hand, a little scrap of yellow canvas, for example, she would make that gesture and say that it was sad, of course it was sad, but those little girls weren’t little girls; most of them, in fact, were lost. The girl didn’t understand: well of course they’re lost, haven’t you seen the posters? But her sister-in-law’s friend, the girl’s friend, didn’t mean that. She meant that they worked in prostitution, did she get it? They took drugs or sold them or both. They went out alone at night or in bad company or tempting men in roadside bars. They were girls who paid for the trip north with their bodies, the body’s ATM, the cuerpomático—and on saying this, cuerpomático—the sister-in- law’s friend touched her breasts. Oh, the girl says she responded at the time. That was all. And she was left thinking about the pictures she’d seen on the posters, which looked like they were from a First Communion, or a quinceñera at most. She thought about that for a few days, about their First Communions, about where and how they had celebrated their fifteenth birthdays, and about how their parents must have suffered over the bad lives their daughters were living.

*

Word by word, drink by drink, the girl has drained her glass. Now she fills it again. Time for the second tequila has come and with it, the heaviest part of her story. Because the factory where the girl worked might have had labor agreements, and prizes for attendance and prizes for performance, and employee of the month, employee of the week, and social security, free laundry service for their uniforms, but it also had a very strict policy about punctuality. If you got to work late, even just a minute late, you didn’t get in. Two minutes. That was how late the sister-in-law’s friend was, the friend who was, by that time, the girl’s friend. At least that’s how the girl would remember her: as her friend. That’s how she has been fossilized in her memory: the wee hours of one morning in some summer month in such-and-such a year. It was two minutes past midnight: that she can state with certainty. Two minutes late and they wouldn’t let her in. That was as much as the girl knew and what she would later tell the police, when at eight o’clock in the morning she got home, never to see her friend again. She didn’t actually tell the police right at that time, because first she wanted to be patient, wait a couple of hours, and then because the Mexican police have their procedures and protocols. One was required to wait so many hours, entire days, before filing a report. How many hours, how many days? The girl doesn’t recall. What she does remember is that the commissioner who met with her was very gentlemanly, very polite, he pulled out a chair for her and even asked how she liked her coffee. She asked for it with a splash of milk because she’d heard that was a classy way to order, with a splash of milk, although she didn’t even like milk and only sort of liked coffee; but she was weakened by her tears and intended to please the police every way she could. I-don’t-know-what percentage of the muchachitas—that’s what he called them, “muchachitas”—reappear within seventy-two hours of their own volition. That’s what the commissioner said. The girl doesn’t remember the figure: it was a high percentage. And the other percent? she asked, coffee cup trembling in her hand. The commissioner raised his eyebrows. A short time later, they called to tell her that her friend belonged to the small percentage, not the large group. It wasn’t the norm: at least not according to the statistics. There were inquiries. There were witnesses who said they’d seen a black car stopped at the factory entrance, and also a white motorcycle, and a car that was a sort of a pistachio yellow. There was a small press release. There were posters with a blurry photograph. Her sister-in-law’s friend was nineteen and in the only picture the girl had of her, she was smiling and winking at the camera. That was how the neighbors would see her, multiplied and laminated and cyclostyled by the city’s streetlights and bus shelters. One afternoon, after posting a dozen leaflets around a block far from the apartment, she overheard a conversation between two boys who stopped to look at one of posters. The picture of her winking friend. She didn’t hear or didn’t recall hearing what the first kid said. But the second kid replied: One of those girls with the body’s ATM, he said, grabbing his balls. She started to cry and the boys asked her if she needed help and she answered that she didn’t need any help thank-you-very-much. But she didn’t cry, however, when the police called her. Identifying the body wasn’t as hard as she’d imagined, either: by then, she’d had lots of time to read plenty about the girls who got lost in that city. She knew what she could expect. She knew about ritualistic mutilations, nipples bitten off, rampageous rapes, the female cadavers—as they were called—that turned up with stiff arms, as if embracing the air; as if they were still embracing the last man who fucked them. In gynecologic positions, the experts said, which meant that the thing never ended, that, even dead, they looked like they were still getting fucked. As for her friend, the murder or murderers respected her, all things considered. Up to a certain point, at least. The deceased’s demise was caused by strangulation, and most certainly occurred the same day as the kidnapping. She had been raped, yes, but only vaginally; no matter how thoroughly they explored her rectum, no signs of abrasion, tearing, or dilation were found. That, the absence of anal rape, was of great consternation to the medical examiner. The modus operandi, he said with a sigh, appears to have changed. But she, the girl, wasn’t interested in the modus operandi. Over the preceding weeks she had read everything she could get her hands on about the wave of femicides, in the papers or online—because her factory, in addition to paying for your funeral if, God forbid, you died, also had a kind of employee internet café where they could call their relatives or play solitaire or do whatever they liked. She knew as much as could be known about the subject, which wasn’t a lot. She knew the guilty party was a serial killer who mimicked other serial killers, imitators in theory but just as lethal in practice. She knew blame lay with the patriarchy. She knew blame lay with excess: an excess of women and an excess of desert. Blame lay with the gringos, who crossed the border like they were going on safari, hunters ready to claim their female trophies. Blame lay with the Mexicans, who no longer believed in the Virgin of Guadalupe with the intensity of yesteryear. Blame lay with the government. With the narcos. With the narco-government. Blame lay with the women, who walked alone. Blame lay with the women, who walked in bad company. Blame lay with the women, who were pretty. Blame lay with shamanic rituals and black magic and the Santa Muerte and the Aztecs. Blame lay with living like this, partway between the city and the desert, between Mexico and the United States, between Heaven and Hell, on that irresolute land between something and nothing. Blame lay with values, with a lack of values. Blame lay with poverty. Blame lay with the desert. That’s what the girl read, and read, and read, like she’d read ads before, other claims, other highway signs and leaflets and billboards. Fuck it all. The factory, too: fuck it. As the deceased’s next of kin—her? she was her sister-in-law’s friend’s next of kin?—she was left a bit of money. With that money, she bought what she had come to buy. Prices had gone up again—supply and demand, sister, free market—but still she had enough, she had enough, and when she went to hand over the bill to the pollero, the girl, who, until that moment, had known nothing, nonetheless knew, or intuited, something, or rather believed something blindly, irrationally, in a way she herself could not reasonably explain: that the price of her friend’s cheap death meant that she’d have to pay so dearly for the passage.

*

The end of the story lives at the bottom of the third glass of tequila. The girl looks down at it, and looks again before she finishes.

*

Purchase ��from better bookstores everywhere, , , or .

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac
Translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey
216 pgs. | pb | 9781616959234 | $22.00

Reviewed by Grant Barber

Dark Constellations, the second novel in translation by the author of Savage Theories, continues the intriguing, complex narratives of science, technology, and searches for meaning and control in the personal and economic/political. Both novels jump around in time. Each epoch pushes boundaries of connectedness between the human and non-human, sometimes mystical, other times exploitive and weirdly, humorously absurd. Readers of Oloixarac’s novels seem to struggle with how to decide where to shelve these books: there are certainly elements of cyber-punk and science fiction. There is some Venn Diagram of relatedness in which a wider range of genres fits: Richard Power’s Plowing the Dark, �ٱ𳢾�������’s White Noise, ���ǰ��ǰ쾱��’s Ice; Bulgakov’s phantasmagoria and Nicola Barker’s disrupted narratives; Monty Python when the humor is biting, horrifying; and Andrea Barrett’s historical scientific concerns. And yet, we are not dealing with magical realism. Oloixarac is part of a grander movement of new Latinx writers, which includes the likes of El Salvadorian Castellano Moya of Dances with Snakes and Samanta Schweblin with Mouthful of Birds. Oloixarac’s writing is one of many styles of the new, but all these novels consist of ideas grounded in particulars, which is ultimately missing from so many dreary, derivative fictions of USA/British writers of manners and social convention.

Oloixarac’s writing is original, with unique preoccupations. Dark Constellations starts in the nineteenth century as European scientists seek an orchid’s pollen in the Canary Islands that is reported to break down barriers of human consciousness between people, but also human and non-human. Traveling into a cave system, scientists such as cartographer Torben Schats and insect merchant (?!) Diotimus Redbach find themselves overwhelmed by the hidden city of an indigenous tribe. They appear again later, but then we move on to Cassius, an student from Argentina studying computer coding and who later works at Stromatoliton, a company that seems to have a stake in the private, the public, the international, the dark web, and a future that breaks down divisions of species, people, corporations, and countries.

At the conclusion of his translation of Savage Theories, Roy Kesey writes a short afterword with observations on Oloixarac’s writing. He notes a sense of displacement, and already looks toward Dark Constellations, which joins the first “as every bit as rich and enfoldingly complex.” This is true on several levels of narrative structure and continuation of images and themes of which the keen reader might want to keep track. On a basic level of sentences (and the challenges the Spanish might have created for a translator), consider this concluding paragraph for one of the final chapters:

Ailín laid her head to rest next to the computer. Suddenly, Ailín and Noelia and Leni ceased to exist, and Cassio took up his lambskin jacket and patted Mossad, who meowed like a hoarse mockingbird. Cassio waved a liminal goodbye and was jettisoned out of the house. Violet glimmerings descended from the peak of the sky, covering everything, sliding down the side of the frozen mountain. Suddenly, his own trajectory painted itself sharply against the world.

A whole lot is going on just in those few sentences: acting and being acted on, unstable reality at least in perception, species confabulation, sky and earth features, allusion to the secretive political (Mossad) reduced to non-meaning, transcendence, specificity. If asked, could you demonstrate the act of “a liminal goodbye?”

We are in the near future. The women named in the above passage are the new “resistance,” literally painted as superficial as they try to disguise their faces from being scanned by public cameras, painting them with black and white triangle shapes. Cassio, who has been nurturing virus codes, has planted them throughout the world-wide web, one of the several trans-historical, trans-national, trans-personal constellations of the book’s title. The government and Cassio’s company have figured ways to capture the DNA of each person first via live samples, then exhumed corpses, and finally with monitors similar to public security cameras—Bionoses—which hoover up airborne DNA molecules from the general public. The revolutionary impulse of the population post-Argentinian dictatorship has devolved into the wearied but predictable co-opting of such projects—in which the government and corporations use scientific means for threatening but unclear gain.

I don’t think it is a spoiler to urge the reader to keep with the novel in order to reach a phantasmagoric, wonderfully absurd moment later on: a swarm of rats in a five-year cycle, triggered by the blooming of a specific plant that covers them in a neon-green dust. As the rats later die they first form copies of star constellations. According to one character, we can discern the really real by not looking at the stars/constellations, but at the black voids, the dark, titular constellations where there is no light. Head-scratching, profound sounding, a strung-together set of metaphors that might echo theoretical physics, nihilism, sure sounds like scientific deep thought or one of the earliest human attempts to figure out cause and effect: as above, so below, and vice versa. But these are the musings of a fellow looking at Day-Glo rats being exterminated while mysteriously forming constellation patterns, all brought about by an ability of humans to reach across the species barrier. A deep parallel exists between this descent down to the animalistic as Cassio reveals the technological nodes of the computer virus he has spent a lifetime surreptitiously disseminating, one that no one could debug or contain due to its complexity and reach.

In the end, Cassio comes to embody the worldwide reality, the how and the why waiting to be discovered by the reader who joins the journey of the novel. Another aspect that merits touching on is Oloixarac’s carna(l)tional, portrayal of the erotic. She writes about women’s reality, and differently from the more masculine (Updike? Roth?) build-up to a specific eruptive event, often described in cringe worthy language. In contrast, Oloixarac weaves frank, descriptive responses of female characters as incremental parts of life.

Oloixarac has an inventiveness, an imagination that stands apart from all those other (mostly male) writers I referenced at the start. She has control over images and ideas, which makes for little to no waste of words building up this world and its story. I don’t intend all of this to sound so dry, deadly serious. The writing has wit, playfulness, as Kesey also points out the “satiric key” that a reader needs keep in mind while tracking the jumps of time and place. We can look forward to more from this author, and one hopes the same translator, as Oloixarac’s third novel, Mona, has been recently published in Spanish.

The Truce��by Mario Benedetti
translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales
192 pgs. | pb | 9780141396859 | £8.99��

Reviewed by Arianna Aron

Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), Uruguay’s most beloved writer, was a man who loved to bend the rules. He gave his haikus as many syllables as fit his mood, and wrote a play divided into sections instead of acts. In his country, he was an outspoken supporter of the Frente Amplio, resisting the brutal dictatorship that forced him into a 12-year exile. He was a man who took sides, and took chances. That such a man could invent the intimate diary of a person like Martín Santomé says much for Benedetti’s deep sensitivity to the human condition. The diary is the text for his 1960 novel La Tregua (The Truce).

Martín Santomé is a 49-year-old worn out accountant close to retirement, a widower living with his three grown children. A casual bed fellow once described him as looking like a clerk even when he’s making love. He is so unimaginative that, of all the occupations in the world, what he would choose if he’d be something other than an accountant, is to be a waiter. As he looks back on the 20 years since his wife’s death, he realizes that he hasn’t been happy, but he did right by his children. He was spared “the unyielding look that is reserved for heartless fathers.”

A man of his times, Santomé is upset by his younger son’s homosexuality. He blames himself for Jaime’s “deviance,” and can’t understand why Blanca and Esteban turned out “normal.” But Martín Santomé continues to be the dutiful father, and we appreciate him for that, just as we forgive him for defining women by their body parts and believing that when they’re menstruating they can’t concentrate. Unlike certain contemporary homophobes and misogynists, he has no rancor toward gays and women, and is in fact a person who both tolerates and accepts differences so well that he welcomes a female colleague at work when she is one of three new employees assigned to his department. As with the male workers, he calls her by her family name, which happens to be the surname of the author who wrote a phony Part Two of Don Quixote (a book that made Cervantes very angry because in the counterfeit edition, Don Quixote falls out of love with Dulcinea). Benedetti, the consummate writer, must have seen something compelling there, because soon after Avellaneda comes to work for Santomé, he falls in love with her—with a love that is transformative and enduring.

Martín Santomé had never imagined this romance. For a long time he’d been satisfied with anonymous one-night stands that had nothing in common with the sense of communion he’d felt with Isabel, his deceased wife. With her, he tells his diary, “every one of my impulses mathematically found its own receptive echo. We were made for each other.” The love for Avellaneda, a woman half his age, was a surprise that happened to him, not something he’d gone looking for.

When the accountant first contemplates what it could be like with Avellaneda, what troubles him most is the mismatch between what he sees as her youthful expectations and his future of guaranteed arthritis—the portent of a relationship with barely a temporary patent. In ten years, when he’s pushing 60 and she is 33: will she cheat on him? Leave him for a younger man? As the affair progresses, though, Avellaneda declares her love, explaining to Martín that it’s not for his face, or his years, or his words, or his intentions that she loves him, but because he is a good man. His preoccupation now becomes her future happiness. He broods over whether there will be enough strength and longevity to give her a good life, a concern that becomes sadly ironic as the story unfolds.

Harry Morales, the translator of this intriguing novel, does a fine job of giving Santomé a voice in English. Whether the accountant is speaking of the tedium and frustrations of office work, or the aging lover is fretting over physical and existential issues inherent in May-December romances, or the rejuvenated man is reflecting on his feelings for this “truce” that is occurring in his otherwise dreary life, the diarist’s entries—always a bit reserved—draw us in and make us a part of his world.

Though Martín Santomé’s world is confined to the small middle-class society of Montevideo in mid-twentieth-century Uruguay, his issues with family, career, aging, retirement, and above all, love and loss, resonate beyond borders and time to make his diary a touching and rewarding universal read. Of the ninety books Benedetti published, The Truce stands out for its popularity, with more than a million copies sold, translation into twenty languages, and a 1974 film version by Sergio Renán that was nominated for an Academy Award. In Martín Santomé’s simple urban life there is a depth and authenticity that people everywhere can identify with and appreciate, and now, with Harry Morale��’s refreshing new translation, readers of English can enjoy this engaging novel by one of Latin America’s most acclaimed writers.

Kingdom Cons��by Yuri Herrera
translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
220 pgs. | pb | 9781908276926 |��$13.95��

Reviewed by Sarah Booker

Yuri Herrera is overwhelming in the way that he sucks readers into his worlds, transporting them to a borderland that is at once mythical in its construction and powerfully recognizable as a reflection of its modern-day counterpart. Kingdom Cons, originally published in Spanish in 2004 and translated by Lisa Dillman, is Herrera’s third novel to be published in English (though the first he wrote in Spanish) and it completes his loosely-connected triptych of border novels. In his other novels, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015) and The Transmigration of Bodies (2016), Herrera tackles the experience of crossing the border, the conflicts between crime families, and the effects of disease within the context of the US/Mexico border. Taking on the upper echelons of narco-culture in this text, Kingdom Cons examines the possibilities of language, artistic creation, and the construction of power in a way that feels staggeringly contemporary and necessary.

Herrera’s writing can perhaps best be characterized by the ways that he blends myth and reality. In Kingdom Cons, a drug lord becomes a King, his cartel is depicted as his court, and his palatial residence is transformed into his kingdom. This structure can partly be explained by the author’s writing approach; in an interview published in “Latin American Literature Today”: http://www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/en/2017/april/literature-political-responsibility-interview-yuri-herrera-radmila-stefkova-and-rodrigo, Herrera explains that he writes lists of words that he will not use (such as Mexico, United States, border, drugs, and narco-trafficking) as a way of avoiding clichés, but this also means that his writing takes on a more mythical feeling as it is distanced from the specific culture depicted. While it clearly engages with the genre, Kingdom Cons is not a narco-novela because of this approach and the underlying critique of narco-culture that is embedded in the novel.

The novel is told from the perspective of Lobo, or the Artist, who makes his way into the court by composing and singing songs—or narcocorridos, as they are commonly known—about the grandeur of the King and his court. Also referred to as Songbird, he is an artist-figure navigating a world of crime and violence. He plays and records his songs and the recordings are sold on the streets—“After all, isn’t that the way we do business?” muses the king—and this circulation contributes to the construction of the King’s grandeur. With roots in Spanish romances, the corrido is a traditional Mexican musical form that typically narrates historical events and functions as a primary means of circulating information and news before the advent of radio and television. Narcocorridos draw on these same traditions, but they engage with narco-culture. As can be seen in the novel, this music is banned from public spaces, such as the radio, in an attempt to suppress narco-culture, but they nevertheless have a significant function within these societies as they create and circulate the narratives that legitimize the authority of those in power.

In the novel, the Artist is quickly incorporated into the kingdom because of his ballads, becoming visible to the rest of the community when he is needed to compose or perform. In the meantime, he almost invisibly moves through the kingdom, learning the secrets hidden there and getting involved in a somewhat predictable illicit affair. As the kingdom begins to collapse and the Artist returns to the world he previously occupied and witnesses another kingdom where all he can see is that “it was all the same,” he begins to understand that he has become a part of a system that makes an individual all-powerful, but that he still maintains agency within this system: “Who was the King? An all powerful. A ray of light who had lit up the margins because it couldn’t be any other way as long as it wasn’t revealed what he was. A sad sack, a man betrayed. A single drop in the sea of men with stories. A man with no power over the terse fabric inside the artist’s head.”

For me, the plot and characters of Kingdom Cons are not as compelling as those I found in Signs Preceding the End of the World, which does mark a greater maturity on the writer’s part, but the beauty and importance of this novel resides more in the underlying questioning of power and the narrative itself. Herrera’s inventive use of language is well-matched by Dillman’s own linguistic artistry, leading to a staggeringly beautiful piece of writing. The narrative itself feels like it comes from another time, creating resonances with medieval Spanish literature or the music of the early twentieth-century United States. There is something subversively jazzy about the pace, improvised words, sparsity, and marginality of the narrative that is reminiscent of the Beat writers. For example, there is a heavy use of verbs, some of which are invented, which gives the novel a greater sense of agitated movement, such as in the following example: “The man backed up and cactus-armed in fear.” Dillman skillfully adapts Herrera’s creative use of language into the English—a challenge that she discusses in her Translator’s Note in _Signs Preceding the End of the World_—by using similar techniques to play with the sounds of the language and the images that it conjures. As an example of this, Dillman renders lush imagery while also paying particular attention to the repetition of certain sounds in the following passage: “He heard tell of mountains, of jungles, of gulfs, of summits, in singsong accents entirely new to him: yesses like shesses, words with no esses, some whose tone soared up so high and sank so low it seemed each sentence was a journey: it was clear they were from nowhere near here.”

Language, however, is not just an adornment in the novel, but something that is central to the underlying questions of power. Early on there is a discussion of the Artist’s love of language and the sounds it makes: “For him school was brief, a place where he sensed the harmony of letters, the rhythms that strung them together and split them apart.” Words were, for him, an escape from the world rather than a reflection or creation of it:

He started writing songs about stuff that happened to others. He knew nothing of love but he’d heard stories, so he’d mention it amid wisdom and proverbs, give it a beat, and sell it. But it was all imitation, a mirror held up to lives overheard. And though he suspected there was more he could do with his songs, he didn’t know how to go deeper. It had all been said before. Why bother.

Once he becomes a part of the kingdom, though, the Artist’s words take on a new significance as they are used to create power and to construct reality. Herrera’s words, on the other hand, reflect a certain reality as his novel demonstrates the ways that power can be systematically created through language in a way that is just as believable in the underground crime world as it is in the contemporary political scene.

The Invented Part��by Rodrigo Fresán
translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
552 pgs. | pb |��9781940953564 | $18.95

Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols

Imagine reading a work that suddenly and very accurately calls out you, the reader, for not providing your full attention to the act of reading. Imagine how embarrassing it is when you, the reader, believe that you are engrossed in a work only to have the work identify and criticize your lack of attention. Yes, my phone was next to me at all times while reading Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part, and often I was tempted to dash off 140 character reactions to the work, only to be shamed by it a few lines down in the text. This is part of the charm that is The Invented Part. Weaved throughout it are reflections and criticisms of our shift from the written word on a page to a screen. The timing of the publication of the English translation is perfect in light of the behaviors of our current news cycle, the relationships our elected officials have with Twitter, email, the methods used to inform themselves of “reality,” and our current dilema of phrasing through what is real and what is fake.

The Invented Part can be summarized as creating a discourse around the question: How do writer’s view their craft, reality, and relationships with readers and with those individuals who play a role in their lives? The response is addressed through distinguishing the invented part—the part that is created by a writer—and the real part—the reality leveraged by the writer. Through this work, the protagonist, The Writer, draws or focus to the question of our relationship with writers, books, and technology and the literary industry, which frustrates The Writer and causes him in turn to question the role and future physical presence of literature. The Writer is disillusioned with the state of the literary industry and thus decides to travel to CERN and merge with the Higgs boson, resulting in a transformation into invisibility and omnipresence. The publication of the English translation of The Invented Part also coincided with the five-year anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, also known as (to the dislike of most physicists) the God Particle and largely believed to provide matter with mass.

My only disappointment came in reading the summary of the work on the book’s cover, as I approached the work with excitement believing that it would tackle such a complex physics concept within the literary sphere. As I worked through this quite long piece of literature with this expectation, I reached the end with great disappointment on the topic of the Higgs boson. It appears that the transformation into the Higgs boson was merely an anthropomorphism for omniscience. Being that most people would likely believe that something called the “God Particle” would explain the entire universe, the reference works in this sense because The Invented Part’s main tool is omniscient narration (with the ability to change reality).

Divided into seven parts, The Invented Part begins with a section entitled The Real Character, which is focused on a family (The Young Man, The Young Woman, and The Boy), which is formed due to a common love for a writer’s work and ends in separation, although both parties continue to read the same works by the writer. Part Two focuses of the unusual experience of The Young Man’s and The Young Women’s stay at the home of The (disappeared) Writer during the making of their documentary film on The Writer’s life, accompanied with an excursion through the early life of The Writer’s eccentric sister, who marries into a family (based in the land of Abracadabra) that is hard to distinguish from the Kardashians, or a family with many company brands (think steak, hotels, failed universities) and vast amounts of property, but with no indication of how the money is really made. Part Three focuses on The Writer’s experience at a hospital as he approaches the age where pain is now a matter of death or a non-issue and is no longer something that can be casually ignored. Part Four contains The Writer’s personal notes for a work in development concerning the relationship between the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys, written in the biji style and defined as “curious anecdotes, nearly blind quotations, random musings, philosophical speculations, private theories regarding intimate matters, criticism of other works, and anything that is owner and author deems appropriate.” The focus in Part Five is the relationship between a father, a friend of The Writer, and his son through the father’s relationship with music during his teenage years. Part Six brings us back to The Young Man and The Young Woman during an encounter after their separation, where they meet on the stairs to a museum. Finally, in Part Seven, the reader experiences The Writer’s motivations, insecurities, and what appear to be the beginning of his first work after the disillusionment and transformation.

It was no easy task to get through The Invented Part, mainly because the work presents life experiences in a way that the reader cannot help but reflect on each example, instance, and occurrence presented in the work in real-time. Fresán does this by presenting the reader with familiarities—Pink Floyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Mary Shelley, David Bowie—and uses those references to call upon reflection of these bodies of work to explore both our relationship with literature and books surrounding us and the writer, and the writer’s relationships with the same, and with the feeling of actual experience rather than that of a college lecture. Fresán awards the reader who is not only well-read but also well-aware of music originating between the 1960s and 1980s. For example, the following is a list of the literary references by author I noted while reading the work, but I am self-aware enough to know that I did not catch them all.

Borges
Faulkner
Fitzgerald
Dostoyevsky
Mann
Bronte
Nabakov
Burroughs
Beckett
Lovecraft
Tolkien
Quinn
Delillo
Dante
Shikibu
Updike
Conrad
Vonnegut
Hemingway
Wolfe
Lowry
Bradbury
Shelley
Huxley
Gaddis
Flaubert
Amis

Further, Fresán has a special way of describing (inventing) the normal and mundane. For example, airports in The Invented Part are not just airports:

Airports are like enormous and devouring leviathans run aground on the shore of all things, too heavy to be pushed back out to sea. Airports are like cathedrals of an always late and retarded faith . . . and airports are the sanctuary where everyone prays and begs that their flights leave on time, and that they arrive on time, and that their luggage doesn’t disappear in some wrinkle in space-time, and that everything that goes up does come down but doesn’t fall amen. Airports are like hospitals: you know when you go in but not when you’ll come out and you sit there like something patient, something passing.

And oversharing and not just oversharing:

Being missed has gone missing. Being familiar with so much doesn’t mean knowing more. There was a time when the definitive proof of success was the very ability to disappear, to be impossible to find, to have nobody know where you are. To be unreachable. To be outside everything.

Lastly and importantly, The Invented Part contains warnings for the future of the book in our age of technological screens and our inability to be disconnected. For example, it is stated that:

E-readers, supposedly, help to facilitate and accelerate the reading experience, but actually it seems, end up removing the desire to continue readings. But—breaking ancient news, stope the presses—we still read at the same speed as Aristotle. Ģ����ý four hundred fifty words a minute. So, all that external electric velocity at our disposal ends up colliding with our more deliberate internal electricity. In other words: machines are faster and faster but we are not. We haven’t gained much and, along the way, we’ve lost the exquisite pleasure of leisure, which is how and where the stuff of hopes and dreams is made. We live and create, determined to increase out machines’ capacity to store a number of books that we’ll never be able to read. . . . It seems to me that the paper book is nearer out rhythm (there are nights when I deeply envy the environment of the nineteenth century when it comes to reading nineteenth-century novels by candlelight).

In closing, The Invented Part is a work that I will repeatedly refer to, interact with, and re-read as it captures and questions my relationship with literature in magical and embarrassing ways that will continually change as I refamiliarize myself with the classics, expose myself to new works, and go through the process of aging. This tome will be proudly placed next to my copies of 2666 and People of Paper, both of which also relay the same essence, but through vastly different methods.