Born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 but spending much of his youth in Mexico and his later adult life in Spain, Roberto Bolaño had already become a sensation in the Spanish speaking literary world before his untimely death in 2003. Sadly, it’s only really in the years following his death that he’s started to gain wider recognition …
It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone obsesses over lists and gets deeply frustrated if someone else’s list is different from their own. And in keeping with that delightful spirit, prepare to get frustrated by our list of best translated novels of 2019! In all seriousness, though, I love a good list. …
In Argentine tradition and literature, the gaucho – ranchers and horsemen – were, and still are, romanticised in much the same that the cowboys are in modern US folklore and stories. This was most flagrantly epitomised by José Hernández in his great Argentine epic poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro, which told the tale of a …
In the heart of the city there are so many lights. The streets are lit up and the people can see themselves and one another with clarity; there’s nowhere to hide. Close by there is the sea: endless, dark, unknowable. Between the two, in a nameless place, live a father and son. They have no …
So many of our greatest stories of terror and the supernatural come from faraway lands. A nation’s laws, customs, traditions, politics, and religion will have a profound effect on what kinds of stories they want to tell. Horror is a magnificent genre that takes heavy themes, chews them up, and spits them out as something …
Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott How do we define narrative? Traditional narratives as we typically think of them involve an entirely fictional story laid out with familiar beats: chapters, dialogue, and paragraphing; a beginning, middle, and end; exposition, themes, and motifs. But experimental forms of narrative, the kinds that have existed for centuries …
In around one hundred pages, this whip-crack of a novel has the eerie feel of a biblical parable, but one with depths that can be plunged to your heart’s content. With The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada has crafted a story of heroes and villains, with a setting and pace reminiscent of Waiting for …
The feeling of restlessness comes hand-in-hand with the sorrow of parting ways with a place or a person. In All My Goodbyes, Mariana Dimópulos distils these feelings and all their ravaging effects on us into 130 gripping pages. In a single afternoon reading All My Goodbyes, readers will pass through a handful of different countries …
Translated by Megan McDowell There are many ways to approach creating a book of short stories: you can focus on a theme and explore it from different angles, you can write about a single location – a city or a country, or you can simply write what comes to mind. Wait for those stories that …
There is a wave that is steadily gaining momentum in the world today, and that wave is being ridden by a steadily increasing number of young authors – Chloe Aridjis, with her novel Sea Monsters, is one of them. That wave is one of millennial existentialism. As children, we grew up witnessing our parents’ mid-life …