Search results for ""Author Megan McDowell""

A young boy plays hide and seek in the suburbs of Santiago, unaware that his neighbours are becoming entangled in the brutality of Pinochet's regime. Then one night a mysterious girl appears in his neighbourhood and makes a life-changing request.

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An uncompromisingly honest collection of short stories, examining with unique perspicacity the missteps, mistakes and misunderstandings that define our lives. Pride and disgrace. Nostalgia and revenge. Tenderness and seduction. From the dusty backstreets of Santiago and the sun-baked alleyways of impoverished fishing villages to the dark stairwells of urban apartment blocks, Paulina Flores paints an intimate picture of a world in which the shadow of humiliation, of delusion, seduction and sabotage, is never far away. This is a Chile we seldom see in fiction. With an exceptional eye for human fragility, with unfailing insight and extraordinary tenderness, Humiliation is a mesmerising collection from a rising star of South American literature, translated from the Spanish by Man Booker International Prize finalist Megan McDowell.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 'Beautiful, horrible... the most exciting discovery I've made in fiction for some time' Kazuo Ishiguro 'Smoky, carnal, dazzling' Lauren Groff Welcome to Buenos Aires, a place of nightmares and twisted imaginings, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. Thrumming with murderous intentions, family betrayals and morbid desires, these stories shine a light on a violent city gripped by urban madness; giving voice to the lost, the oppressed and the forgotten. Lucid and darkly poetic, unsettling and otherworldly, these tales of revenge, witchcraft and fetishes are a masterpiece of contemporary Gothic and a bewitching exploration of the dark inclinations that threaten to lead us over the edge. 'I loved these twisted, lustful whispers in the dark' Daisy Johnson 'Queen of Latin American gothic' Financial Times

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* An Oprah Daily Book of 2022 * A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the three-time International Booker Prize finalist, 'lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.' -O, the Oprah magazine The world of Samanta Schweblin's short stories is dark and destabilising. Here, home is not a place of safety but the site of hidden danger, silent menace, unspoken resentment. Picture-perfect doors and spotless windows conceal lives in disarray, slowly unraveling in the face of obsession and fear, jealousy and desire. Unsettling, exhilarating and fiercely original, these prizewinning stories expose raw and uncomfortable truths about the people and places we think will keep us safe, and ask what happens when that promise proves empty. 'Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious.' New York Times Book Review

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A SPELLBINDINGLY CREEPY COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES, FROM AN ARGENTINIAN LITERARY STAR 'The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin's darkly humorous tales.' J.M. Coetzee Spine-tingling and unexpected, unearthly and strange, the stories of Mouthful of Birds are impossible to forget. The crunch of a bird's wing. A cloud of butterflies, so beautiful it smothers. A crimson flash of blood across an artist's canvas. Samanta Schweblin's writing expertly blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday, pulling the reader into a world that is at once nightmarish and beautiful. An exhilarating tour de force guaranteed to leave the pulse racing. 'This is our world, and sharp-focused, but stripped of its usual meanings... Brutal violence is twisted into horrific, intensely experienced art.' Guardian *Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, 2019*

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From cult sensation Mariana Enriquez, author of the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed "...one of the best novels of the 21st century" - Paul Tremblay "...a magnificent accomplishment and a genuine work of power" - Alan Moore His father could find what was lost. His father knew when someone was going to die. His father had talked to him about the dead who rode in on the wind. The dead travel fast. Gaspar is six years old when the Order first come for him. For years, they have exploited his father's ability to commune with the dead and the demonic, presiding over macabre rituals where the unwanted and the disappeared are tortured and executed, sacrificed to the Darkness. Now they want a successor. Nothing will stop the Order, nothing is beyond them. Surrounded by horrors, can Gaspar break free? Spanning the brutal decades of Argentina's military dictatorship and its aftermath, Our Share of Night is a haunting, thrilling novel of broken families, cursed inheritances, and the sacrifices a father will make to help his son escape his destiny.

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In Not to Read, Alejandro Zambra outlines his own particular theory of reading that also offers a kind of blurry self-portrait, or literary autobiography. Whether writing about Natalia Ginzburg, typewriters and computers, Paul Léautaud, or how to be silent in German, his essays function as a laboratory for his novels, a testing ground for ideas, readings and style. Not to Read also presents an alternative pantheon of Latin American literature – Zambra would rather talk about Nicanor Parra than Pablo Neruda, Mario Levrero than Gabriel García Márquez. His voice is that of a trusted friend telling you about a book or an author he’s excited about, how he reads, and why he writes. A standard-bearer of his generation in Chile, with Not to Read Alejandro Zambra confirms he is one of the most engaging writers of our time.

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VIRGINIA VALLEJO:Top Colombian television journalist, cover model and socialitePABLO ESCOBAR:Head of the Medellin cartel, the founder of the global cocaine industry and one of the most ambitious - and brutal - criminals in historyOver the course of their tempestuous love affair, Vallejo witnessed first-hand the bloodshed, fear and corruption that accompanied the rise of Escobar's crime empire. In this explosive tale of drugs, sex, wealth and violence, Vallejo describes the man she knew and loved. But, increasingly plagued by threats of kidnap and death for her knowledge on Escobar's ties to the political establishment, Vallejo sought extradition to the United States. Her testimony would reopen one of the most important criminal cases in Colombian history.

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* An Oprah Daily Book of 2022 * A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the three-time International Booker Prize finalist, 'lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.' -O, the Oprah magazine The world of Samanta Schweblin's short stories is dark and destabilising. Here, home is not a place of safety but the site of hidden danger, silent menace, unspoken resentment. Picture-perfect doors and spotless windows conceal lives in disarray, slowly unraveling in the face of obsession and fear, jealousy and desire. Unsettling, exhilarating and fiercely original, these prizewinning stories expose raw and uncomfortable truths about the people and places we think will keep us safe, and ask what happens when that promise proves empty. 'Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious.' New York Times Book Review

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The debut collection from the acclaimed author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and Our Share of Night. 'An utterly brilliant measure of deep existential terror... You [will] return home looking pale and haunted' Observer Sleep-deprived fathers conjuring phantoms; sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls; persecuted young women drawn to self-immolation. Organized crime sits side-by-side with the occult in Buenos Aires - a place where reality and the supernatural fuse into strange, new shapes. These acclaimed gothic tales follow the wayward and downtrodden, revealing the scars of Argentina's dictatorship and the ghosts and traumas that have settled in the minds of its people. Provocative, brutal and uncanny, Things We Lost in the Fire is contemporary gothic at its darkest and best. 'The only book that's ever left me afraid to turn out the lights... mercilessly incisive and deeply creepy' Irish Times 'Books of the Year' 'These spookily clear-eyed, elementally intense stories are the business' Helen Oyeyemi

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017 Tightly wound and full of dread, Fever Dream is a chilling tale of maternal love and environmental catastrophe, from an Argentinian literary star 'The book I wish I had written' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women and Animal A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a remote Argentinian hospital. A boy named David sits beside her. She's not his mother. He's not her child. At David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, a conversation that opens a chest of horrors. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. A chilling tale of maternal anxiety and ecological menace, Fever Dream is a modern classic. Samanta Schweblin's unforgettable debut is a prescient warning about our manipulation of the natural world, and an unforgettable exercise in literary suspense. 'A gloriously creepy fable' Guardian, 'Best Fiction of 2017'

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'This stylish debut novel by an Oscar-winning Argentine screenwriter (he co-wrote Birdman) is a suspenseful, darkly funny exploration of the creative process and the porous boundary between reality and fiction. Highly recommended' The Mail on Sunday, 'The Best New Fiction'From the Academy Award-winning co-writer of Birdman, a wonderfully eccentric, suspenseful debut in the tradition of Misery and Kiss of the Spiderwoman about a screenwriter kidnapped by a world-famous director who orders him to compose a masterpiece.Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo's diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he's written the previous day.The clash between the two men and their different approaches leads to a movie being made, a gun going off, an unlikely escape, and a final confrontation. In the end, The Crossed-Out Notebook is a darkly funny novel full of intrigue and surprise about the essence of the creative process; a short, crazy ode to any artist whose brilliance shines through strangeness and adversity.

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'This stylish debut novel by an Oscar-winning Argentine screenwriter (he co-wrote Birdman) is a suspenseful, darkly funny exploration of the creative process and the porous boundary between reality and fiction. Highly recommended' The Mail on Sunday, 'The Best New Fiction'From the Academy Award-winning co-writer of Birdman, a wonderfully eccentric, suspenseful debut in the tradition of Misery and Kiss of the Spiderwoman about a screenwriter kidnapped by a world-famous director who orders him to compose a masterpiece.Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo's diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he's written the previous day.The clash between the two men and their different approaches leads to a movie being made, a gun going off, an unlikely escape, and a final confrontation. In the end, The Crossed-Out Notebook is a darkly funny novel full of intrigue and surprise about the essence of the creative process; a short, crazy ode to any artist whose brilliance shines through strangeness and adversity.

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“This slim and vital novel is a tour de force; it will floor you, and lift you right the way up—I adored it.” —Claire-Louise Bennett , author of PONDDuring the summer of 2014, on one of the stormiest days on record to hit the coast of Uruguay, 31-year old Alejandro, lifeguard and younger brother of our protagonist and narrator, dies after being struck by lightning. This marks the opening of a novel that combines memoir and fiction, unveiling an intimate exploration of the brotherly bond, while laying bare the effects that death can have on those closest to us and also on ourselves.It’s always the happiest and most talented who die young. People who die young are always the happiest of all…Can grief be put into words? Can we truly rationalise death to the point of embracing it? Older Brother is the vehicle Mella uses to tackle these fundamental questions, playing with tenses and narrating in the future, as if all calamities described are yet to unfold. In a style reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis and J.D. Salinger, recalling in parts Cronenberg’s or Burgess’s examination of violence and society, Mella takes us with him in this dizzying journey right into the centre of his own neurosis and obsessions, where fatality is skilfully used to progressively draw the reader further in.

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Bonsai is the story of Julio and Emilia, two young Chilean students who, seeking truth in great literature, find each other instead. Like all young couples, they lie to each other, revise themselves, and try new identities on for size, observing and analyzing their love story as if it’s one of the great novels they both pretend to have read. As they shadow each other throughout their young adulthoods, falling together and drifting apart, Zambra spins a formally innovative, metafictional tale that brilliantly explores the relationship among love, art, and memory.

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In San Agustín de Tango, you can never be sure what’s waiting around the corner. Over the course of a single day – the day before today – the hero of this novel and his adored wife embark on a journey through the absurd and the surreal, encountering a choir of monkeys and a carnivorous ostrich, travelling from the studio of an artist obsessed with the colour green to the waistcoat pocket of a pot-bellied man. All the while, the tolling of the bell in the city square pushes their whirlwind adventure towards its fateful conclusion.

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Lucina, a young Chilean writer, has moved to New York to pursue an academic career. While at a party one night, something that her doctors had long warned might happen finally occurs: her eyes haemorrhage. Within minutes, blood floods her vision, reducing her sight to sketched outlines and tones of grey, rendering her all but blind. As she begins to adjust to a very different life, those who love her begin to adjust to a very different woman - one who is angry, raw, funny, sinister, sexual and dizzyingly alive.

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A visionary novel about our interconnected world, about the collision of horror and humanity, from the Man Booker-shortlisted master of the spine-tingling tale A Guardian & Observer Best Fiction Book of 2020 * A Sunday Times Best Science Fiction Book of the Year * The Times Best Science Fiction Books of the Year * NPR Best Books of the Year World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2020 * Ebook Travel Guides Best 5 Books of 2020 * A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 They’re not pets. Not ghosts or robots. These are kentukis, and they are in your home. You can trust them. They care about you... They've infiltrated apartments in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of Sierra Leone, town squares of Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. Anonymous and untraceable, these seemingly cute cuddly toys reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls – but they also expose the ugly truth of our interconnected society. Samanta Schweblin's wildly imaginative new novel pulls us into a dark and complex world of unexpected love, playful encounters and marvellous adventures. But beneath the cuddly exterior, kentukis conceal a truth that is unsettlingly familiar and exhilaratingly real. This is our present and we’re living it – we just don’t know it yet. *Little Eyes comes with two different covers, and the cover you receive will be chosen at random*

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My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this collection of stories evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. Written with the author's trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy, My Documents is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.

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"A multilayered exploration of ideas . . . [A] masterly voyage of discovery" New York Times"Fonseca's most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date" JAVIER CERCAS"An exceptional and intricate novel of depth, insight and understanding" Irish Times"A tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive" KATHARINA VOLCKMER"A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative" GUY GUNARATNE"Expansive and thought-provoking" GuardianA dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild.In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and '80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator's own story: Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza's novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years.From the Guatemalan wilderness to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the anti-Semitic commune founded in Paraguay by Nietzsche's sister, Austral takes us on a long journey south, following a trail of ecological and cultural destruction to excavate contemporary xenophobia."Reminiscent of the best of Bolaño, Borges and Calvino" GuardianTranslated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

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An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016" A Foreword Reviews Reviewers' Choice Selection for "14 Favorites of 2016" "A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." -- Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop "A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." -- Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships. Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.

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Reader, your life is full of choices. Some will bring you joy and others will bring you heartache. Will you choose to cheat (in life, the examination that follows) or will you choose to copy? Will you fall in love? If so, will you remember her name and the number of freckles on her back? Will you marry, divorce, annul? Will you leave your run-down neighbourhood, your long-suffering country and your family? Will you honour your dead, those you loved and those you didn't? Will you have a child, will you regret it? Will you tell them you regret it? Will you, when all's said and done, deserve a kick in the balls? Will you find, here, in this slender book, fictions that entertain and puzzle you? Fictions that reflect yourself back to you? Will you find yourself? Relax, concentrate, dispel any anxious thoughts. Let the world around you settle and fade. Are you ready? Now turn over your papers, and begin.

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Gonzalo is a frustrated would-be poet in a city full of poets; poets lurk in every bookshop, prop up every bar, ready to debate the merits of Teillier and Millan (but never Neruda - beyond the pale). Then, nine years after their bewildering breakup, Gonzalo reunites with his teen sweetheart, Carla, who is now, to his surprise, the mother of a young son, Vicente. Soon they form a happy sort-of family - a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. In time, fate and ambition pull the lovers apart, but when it comes to love and poetry, what will be Gonzalo's legacy to his not-quite-stepson Vicente? Zambra chronicles with tenderness and insight the everyday moments - absurd, painful, sexy, sweet, profound - that constitute family life in this bold and brilliant new novel.

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From the acclaimed author ofFish Soup, a wickedly self-aware novel of family, memory, and possibility just this side of the uncanny.A tolerable, ordinary life: an adequate, if boring, freelance job; reliably irritating video calls with your sister; half-hearted plans for the future (a writing residency, a child); and, in the middle of your half-furnished apartment, an enormous crate. Unopened, delivered days ago, and getting in the way.InThe Delivery , what’s inside is your estranged mother, and her arrival brings to a head the tentative motions you’ve made to examine the past and the subtle fissures in the life you’ve built. Semi-ordinary happenings take on an otherworldly cast when you look at them sideways, but nothing is stranger, in this place far from home, than the tenuous bonds of family that hold us together, or don’t.

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In the city of San Agustín de Tango, the banal is hard to tell from the bizarre. In a single day, a man is guillotined for preaching the intellectual pleasures of sex; an ostrich in a zoo, reversing roles, devours a lion; and a man, while urinating, goes bungee jumping through time itself—and manages to escape. Or does he? Witness the weird machinery of Yesterday, where the Chilean master Juan Emar deploys irony, digression, and giddy repetitions to ratchet up narrative tension again and again and again, in this thrilling whirlwind of the ecstatically unexpected—all wed to the happiest marriage of any novel, ever. Born in Chile at the tail end of the nineteenth century, Juan Emar was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and lived in self-imposed exile from the literary circles of his day. A cult of Emarians, however, always persisted, and after several rediscoveries in the Spanish-speaking world, he is finally getting his international due with the English-language debut of Yesterday, deftly translated by Megan McDowell. Emar’s work offers unique and delirious pleasures, and will be an epiphany to anglophone readers.

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