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Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.
Staff Pick
Enriquez's short stories are fantastically macabre and suffused with menace. A dead child haunts the living, an ancient evil suffocates its host with anxiety and dread, a teenage obsession turns murderous. Like the best gothic fiction, the darkness of the real-world bleeds into the supernatural and leaves the reader off-kilter. Recommended By Emily B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE - "The lauded Argentine author of What We Lost in the Fire returns with enthralling stories conjured from literary sorcery" (O: The Oprah Magazine), in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges.
KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST - ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, New York Public Library, Electric Lit, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews - "Mariana Enriquez's stories are smoky, carnal, and dazzling." — Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and Fates and Furies
Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken — fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history — with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma.
Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.
Review
"Enriquez's wide-ranging imagination and ravenous appetite for morbid scenarios often reaches sublime heights. Adventurous readers will be rewarded in these trips into the macabre." Publishers Weekly, starred review
Review
"An atmospheric assemblage of cunning and cutting Argentine gothic tales... insidiously absorbing, like quicksand." Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Review
"Rotting little ghosts, heartbeat fetishes, curses and witches and meat: Each of these stories is a luscious, bewitching nightmare. Each one builds up a steady, thrilling dread — until the final lines, when the true horror is revealed. I adore this book." Kirsty Logan, author of The Gracekeepers
Review
"I loved these twisted tales, these lustful whispers in the dark. There is some serious power in this writing." Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters
Review
"Mariana Enriquez's fiction is haunted by the specter of late-twentieth-century Latin American history... Yet because the fiction is so alive, the experience of being in her world is enjoyable." Francine Prose, New York Review of Books
About the Author
Mariana Enriquez is a writer and editor based in Buenos Aires, where she contributes to a number of newspapers and literary journals, both fiction and nonfiction.