Book cover for Pandora by Ana Paula Pacheco
2025 Released
2-3 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Transit BooksISBN 9798893380415
Translated by Julia Sanches

Confined to her apartment, a professor falls into an unlikely romance—with a pangolin.

Ana, a literature professor, plans her remote classes while confined to her apartment during lockdown. Her lover, Alice, has died of Covid. In her place are a series of animals that demand Ana’s care and attention: an overbearing pangolin, a swarm of insects, a giant bat. 

Amid changes in medication and fraught faculty meetings, Ana’s grip on reality loosens. She begins to devise a syllabus on the financialization of art and life, posing questions about labor and intimacy she will use her own body to answer. Her apartment fills with creatures, her teaching slides into absurd allegory, and her sense of what is real, permissible, or politically legible fractures.

Equal parts tender and grotesque, Pandora is a hallucinatory portrait of a mind and a world in collapse, a razor-sharp meditation on desire, delusion, and the absurd endurance of the human.

Julia Sanches

Translated by

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, and Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, for which she won the 2022 PEN translation prize. Born in Brazil, she currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

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