TRANSLATION
By Mónica Ojeda
Coffee House Press, 2023
A TECHNO-HORROR PORTRAIT OF THE FEARS AND DESIRES OF SIX YOUNG ARTISTS WHOSE LIVES ARE UPENDED BY A CONTROVERSIAL VIDEO GAME, FROM NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST MÓNICA OJEDA.
Six young artists share an apartment in Barcelona: Kiki Ortega, a researcher writing a pornographic novel; Iván Herrera, a writer whose prose reveals a deeply conflicted relationship with his body; three siblings, Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia, who quietly search for ways to transcend their abuse as children; and El Cuco Martínez, a video-game designer whose creations push beneath the substrate of the digital world. All of them are connected in different ways to Nefando, a controversial cult video game whose purpose remains a mystery. In the parallel reality of the game, players found relief from the pain of past trauma and present shame, but also a frighteningly elastic sense of self and ethics. Is Nefando a game for horror enthusiasts, a challenge to players' morals, or a poetic exercise? What happens in a virtual world that admits every taboo?
Unsparing, addictive, and perverse, Nefando takes us to the darkest corners of the web, revealing the inevitable entanglement of digital and physical worlds, and of technology and horror.
Read reviews in The New York Times, BOMB Magazine, Full Stop
Translator Interview on Beyond the Zero podcast
Nefando
By Gabriela Ponce
Restless Books, 2022; Dead Ink, 2024
Republic of Consciousness Prize, US & Canada, Shortlist
In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations—until its abrupt absence changes everything.
Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray—or red—zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one’s body, Blood Red revels in the narrator’s autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.
Excerpted in LitHub and The Brooklyn Rail
Read a review in Literal
Blood Red
New and Selected Stories
By Cristina Rivera Garza
With additional translations by Lisa Dillman, Francisca González Arias, Alex Ross, and the author
Dorothy Press, 2022
Republic of Consciousness Prize, US & Canada, Longlist
New and Selected Stories brings together in English translation stories from across Rivera Garza’s career, drawing from three collections spanning over 30 years and including new writing not yet published in Spanish. It is a unique and remarkable body of work, and a window into the ever-evolving stylistic and thematic development of one of the boldest, most original, and affecting writers in the world today.
Read my conversation with Cristina Rivera Garza in Southwest Review
Cristina Rivera Garza and I were in conversation with Sohini Basak for Wasafiri
Read reviews in World Literature Today and NPR
Jawbone
By Mónica Ojeda
Coffee House Press, 2022; New Ruins Press, 2022
National Book Award for Translated Literature Finalist
PEN Translation Prize Longlist
Lambda Prize for Lesbian Fiction Finalist
Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?
When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.
Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.
Watch our launch event with Community Books
Read reviews in The New York Times, Chicago Review of Books, Southwest Review and an excerpt in Words Without Borders
Read: “The National Book Award Interviews: Mónica Ojeda & Sarah Booker” in Words Without Borders
Read: “Fear in the Andes, Mónica Ojeda in Translation: A Translators’ Conversation” in Latin American Literature Today
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country
By Cristina Rivera Garza
Feminist Press, 2020
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Criticism
Grieving is Cristina Rivera Garza’s hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. Drawing together horror theory and historical analysis, she outlines how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking—culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs”—has shaped her country. Working from and against this political context, Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence, and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience.
She states: “As we write, as we work with language—the humblest and most powerful force available to us—we activate the potential of words, phrases, sentences. Writing as we grieve, grieving as we write: a practice able to create refuge from the open. Writing with others. Grieving like someone who takes refuge from the open. Grieving, which is always a radically different mode of writing.”
Read my conversation with Cristina Rivera Garza in LitHub
Watch our launch event with Lina Meruane at Brookline Booksmith
Read reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Words Without Borders
The Iliac Crest
By Cristina Rivera Garza
Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018
On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator’s house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host’s identity. While the two women are strangely intimate, even inventing a secret language, they harass the narrator by claiming repeatedly that they know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. As the increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity, he eventually finds himself in a sanatorium.
Published for the first time in English, this Gothic tale destabilizes male-female binaries and subverts literary tropes.
Read my interview with Sarah Coolidge for the CAT Blog
Read my interview with Denise Kripper for Latin American Literature Today
Short Translations
“Soroche” by Mónica Ojeda, co-translated with Noelle de la Paz | Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror, Two Lines Press, 2024
“Earthquake” by Mónica Ojeda | Southwest Review, 2022
“The Last Sign” by Cristina Rivera Garza | The Baffler, 2022
“Two Nameless Women” by Cristina Rivera Garza | Granta, 2022
“City of Men” by Cristina Rivera Garza | BOMB 159, March 2022
“The Men from Esc” by Cristina Rivera Garza | AGNI 94, 2021
“Inti Raymi” by Mónica Ojeda | Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, 2021
2021 “From Siberia” by Daniela Alcívar Bellolio | Latin American Literature Today 17, 2021
“Sonar Wildly: On the Trail of Gloria Anzaldúa” by Cristina Rivera Garza | The Baffler 56, 2021
“The Language of Pain” by Cristina Rivera Garza | The Paris Review, 2020
“Desiccated Mermaids” by Cristina Rivera Garza | Circumference Magazine 8, 2020
“Inheritance in the Mother Tongue” by Gina Saraceni | Latin American Literature Today 15, 2020
“Touching is a Verb: The Hands of the Pandemic and the Inescapable Questions,” by Cristina Rivera Garza | 3:AM Magazine, 2020
“The Dostoevsky Theorem” by Graciela Goldchluk | Latin American Literature Today 13, 2020
“Of Islands and Roadblocks,” an excerpt from VolcáNica by Sabrina Duque | Latin American Literature Today 12, 2019
“Kiki Oretga,” an excerpt from Nefando by Mónica Ojeda | Brooklyn Rail, 2018
“Jawbone,” an excerpt from Mandíbula by Mónica Ojeda | Latin American Literature Today 8, 2018
“2501 Migrants by Alejandro Santiago” by Cristina Rivera Garza | Asymptote Journal, Summer, 2018
“Simple Pleasure. Pure Pleasure” by Cristina Rivera Garza | Paris Review, Summer, 2018
“On Alert: Writing in Spanish in the United States Today” by Cristina Rivera Garza | Revista de la Universidad de México, Mexamérica Dossier, May, 2018
“Birth” by Camila Fabbri | Palabras Errantes, 2018
“The Date” by Cristina Rivera Garza | iMex: México interdisciplinario, vol. 13, no. 1, 2018
“It Could Be Worse” by Margarita García Robayo | MAKE 17, 2018
“Guga Szabzon, Impossible, Indelible, Inexhaustible” | Translation from the Portuguese of an interview with Guga Szabzon, conducted by Nicolás Llano Linares and Gustavo Nóbrega | Asymptote Journal, Fall, 2018
“Nine Moons,” an excerpt from Nueve lunas by Gabriela Wiener | Nashville Review 24, 2017
“Betrayal,” an excerpt from Cherrufe: La bola de fuego (Novela Mapuche) by Ruth Mariela Fuentealba Millaguir | Latin American Literature Today 4, 2017
“Griselda” by Amparo Dávila | Palabras Errantes, 2017
Dossier: Cristina Rivera Garza, Introduction and Selected Stories | Latin American Literature Today 3, 2017
“The Square Patio” by Amparo Dávila | Literal Magazine Online, 2015
“‘Life Sentence’ by Ricardo Piglia: Translation and Critical Introduction” | Translation Review, vol. 90, no. 1, 2014, pp. 29–50, 2014