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Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
These eleven stories from one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists" combine gritty surrealism with explosive interior meditations, traversing the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called "non-inventor" brings snow-white rabbits to an island inhabited exclusively by birds, with horrific results. In "Myotragus" a privileged man's understanding of the world is violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere in these stories that map dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards, an unsightly "paw" grows from a writer's earlobe and a grandmother floats silently in the corner of the room.
Elvira Navarro won the Community of Madrid's Young Writers Award in 2004. Her first book, La ciudad en invierno (The City in Winter), published in 2007, was well received by the critics, and her second, La ciudad feliz (The Happy City, Hispabooks, 2013) was given the twenty-fifth Jaén Fiction Award and the fourth Tormenta Award for best new author, as well as being selected as one of the books of the year by Culturas, the arts and culture supplement of the Spanish newspaper Público. Granta magazine also named her one of their top twenty-two Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. She is the author of A Working Woman (2017, Two Lines Press); Rabbit Island (2021, Two Lines Press), which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature; and The Voices of Adriana, which has been awarded the 2023 Cálamo Special Prize.
Translated by
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator, working mainly in the areas of Latin American fiction, essays, poetry, and hybrid texts. She has translated works by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez and Elvira Navarro. She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published shorter translations, articles, interviews and collaborations on a wide variety of platforms. Her most recent translations are Jazmina Barrera's Cross-Stitch (shortlisted for the Queen Sofía Institute Translation Prize) and Clyo Mendoza's Fury. In 2024, she was granted a Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci's The Company.
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