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LONGLISTED for the 2025 International Booker Prize
A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.
“Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.” In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.
Dahlia de la Cerda
Dahlia de la Cerda is a writer and activist based in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She is the author of Perras de Reserva, which won the 2019 Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Comala, and Desde los Zulos. She is also the cofounder of the feminist organization Morras Help Morras. Reservoir Bitches is her English-language debut.
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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.
Heather Cleary
Translated by
Heather Cleary’s translations include Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, BTBA 2013) and The Dark (nominee, National Translation Award 2014), and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and has served as a judge for the BTBA and the PEN Translation Award. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translator collective and a founding editor of the digital, bilingual Buenos Aires Review.
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