Living Things
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 QUEEN SOFÍA SPANISH INSTITUTE TRANSLATION PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 BIG OTHER BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION
FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARD
This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction.
Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing...
"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." - Dizz Tate, author of Brutes
"Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." - James Greer, author of Bad Eminence
"Gorgeously labyrinthine." - Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
Munir Hachemi
Munir Hachemi's career as a writer began with him selling his stories in the form of fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. He is the author of Living Things (2018) and El árbol viene (The Tree Comes) (2023), and is also a translator from Chinese and English. In 2021, he appeared on Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list. He currently lives in Buenos Aires.
More by Munir Hachemi
Julia Sanches
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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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