Description
A fascinating short story collection from Latinx academic and heart transplant survivor
Translated by Luciana Erregue in collaboration with the author, Margarita Saona.
Nothing says post-anthropocentric like Saona’s stories. Her characters, resisting gender and other labels inhabit cities that while existing in the real world, refuse to be pinned down on a map. In Saona’s stories, animals behave like humans, humans, like animals, or the elements, in a relentless phantasmagoria reminiscent of ancient mythology. This disembodiment is present in Saona’s narrative style, having herself hovered between life and death shortly before receiving a life-saving new heart. The Spanish original version of THE GHOST OF YOU, (La ciudad en que no estás) gives these ghosts an English-speaking home, in the hopes they can remain in the memory of their readers the same way someone’s presence stills haunts a place.
Fiction. Latinx Studies. Translation.
Author Bio
Margarita Saona teaches Latin American literature and Culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was born in Peru and studied linguistics and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University in New York. She is interested in issues of memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. She has published books on literary and cultural criticism such as Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (London, 2014), and Despadre: Masculinidades, travestismos y ficciones de la ley en la literatura peruana. Her short fiction collections are Comehoras (Lima, 2008), Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012), and La ciudad en que no estás (Lima, 2020). She also has a book of poems, Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (Chicago, 2017) and an unpublished collection of poems entitled Precaria material. She is currently working on two books, a short essay entitled De monstruos y cyborgs and Corazón en trance, a memoir about her experience of heart transplantation.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA
Luciana Erregue is a Canadian Argentinian art historian, writer, translator editor, and publisher, director of Laberinto Press. Her translating credits include the anthology Beyond the Gallery and the translation of poems of Carina Sedevich for Agni Magazine and Fedosy Santaella for Polyglot Magazine.
Author City: EDMONTON, AB CAN