Sacrifices

Winner of the O. Henry Prize for the story "The Mad People of Paris"

These revelatory short stories tread the line between surrealism and realism with strange, appealing characters who take on a sacrifice in spite of themselves.

Translated by Thomas Bunstead

A followup to his first novel, The Night (winner of the Rive Gauche à Paris Prize for foreign books in 2016), this collection of short stories by Venezuelan literary star Rodrigo Blanco Calderón features a taxidermist painter, a blind man lost in Mexico City, a female motorcyclist who rides naked through the night, a foreigner who learns a language making confessions in Paris churches, and a dying pilot who finds peace in a reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Impeccable and masterful in his storytelling, Calderón constructs a nocturnal cast of characters who become the victims and executioners of a sacrifice in the midst of a floundering Venezuela, others with the threat of terrorism in France, or in a Mexico symbolizing the first shots of the revolution.