October 10, 2024
The Center for Fiction welcomed author Mariana Enriquez (Our Share of Night) in celebration of her new fiction collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People is a lyrical, hypnotic collection featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre.
In twelve new stories set in Argentina, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.
Featured Book
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A Sunny Place for Shady People
By Mariana Enriquez
Published by Random House
Translated by Megan McDowell
Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.
Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”
Featuring
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Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez is a writer based in Buenos Aires. In English, she has published the novel Our Share of Night and two story collections, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction.
Photo Credit: Nora Lezano
