Synopses & Reviews
A striking, innovative collection of stories that combines the gritty surrealism of Roberto Bolaño and David Lynch with the explosive meditations of Clarice Lispector, Rabbit Island locates madness and liberation in smoke-filled hotel rooms, mutating cities, and recurring dreams.
Combining the gritty surrealism of David Lynch with the explosive interior meditations of Clarice Lispector, the stories in Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island traverse the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called “non-inventor” conducts an experiment on an island inhabited exclusively by birds and is horrified by what the results portend. “Myotragus” bears witness to a man of privilege’s understanding of the world being violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere, an unsightly “paw” grows from a writer’s earlobe; an obese grandmother floats silently in the corner of a room.
These eleven stories from one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” are psychogeographies of dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards. They act as microscopes fixed upon the regions of our interior lives we often neglect, where the death of God and the failures of institutions have given way to alternative modes of making sense of the world. They are cracked bedroom mirrors. Do you like what you see?
Review
“Elvira Navarro is certainly an excellent storyteller, sharp and brave. Her prose sounds always precise, confident, intense. Among the authors of my generation in Spain, I think she is, doubtless, one of the most engaging." Andrés Neuman, author of Fracture
Review
“This author’s literary talent is a natural gift... the subtle, almost hidden, true avant-gardist of her generation.” Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac's Problem and Vampire in Love
Review
“Elvira Navarro is an enormously gifted and disturbing young writer with an unusual eye for the bizarre; she captures personal fragility with deceptively detached prose that stays with us like a scarring incision.” Lina Meruane, author of Seeing Red
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“Elvira Navarro is one of the most intelligent and daring writers in the Spanish-speaking world.” Daniel Saldaña París, author of Among Strange Victims
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“Rabbit Island is a haunting masterwork. Dreamlike, the worlds presented in these stories feel at once familiar and darkly tilted, unsettling and unforgettable. Brilliantly atmospheric and thick with impending doom, Navarro’s prose is elegantly tense, inventive, and lush.” Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
Review
“Beneath the impeccable surface of Navarro’s ice-cold prose, dread and grief wrestle in a territory of uncanny shadows. Like the work of many great fantasists before her — Robert Walser, Leonora Carrington, Witold Gombrowicz, Remedios Varo — Navarro takes alien landscapes and turns them into eerily apt mirrors of our most secret realities. Grimly comedic, deeply affecting, these stories are a necessary poison, one that revives instead of destroys, emboldens rather than deadens. In spite of all the ghosts, madnesses, nightmares, and grotesque transformations they are subject to, her characters manage to make their own maps, turning endings into beginnings, disgust into love, death to peace: Rabbit Island is a series of unforgettable journeys designed by a master cartographer.” Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion
Synopsis
Brilliantly atmospheric and thick with impending doom, Navarro's prose is elegantly tense, inventive, and lush." --Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
These eleven stories from one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists" combine gritty surrealism with explosive interior meditations, traversing the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called "non-inventor" brings snow-white rabbits to an island inhabited exclusively by birds, with horrific results. In "Myotragus" a privileged man's understanding of the world is violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere in these stories that map dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards, an unsightly "paw" grows from a writer's earlobe and a grandmother floats silently in the corner of the room.
Synopsis
"In this impressionistic, dreamlike collection, Navarro deploys surrealism to comic, haunting effect." --New York Times
These eleven stories from one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists" combine gritty surrealism with explosive interior meditations, traversing the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called "non-inventor" brings snow-white rabbits to an island inhabited exclusively by birds, with horrific results. In "Myotragus" a privileged man's understanding of the world is violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere in these stories that map dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards, an unsightly "paw" grows from a writer's earlobe and a grandmother floats silently in the corner of the room.
Synopsis
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
These eleven stories from one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists" combine gritty surrealism with explosive interior meditations, traversing the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called "non-inventor" brings snow-white rabbits to an island inhabited exclusively by birds, with horrific results. In "Myotragus" a privileged man's understanding of the world is violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere in these stories that map dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards, an unsightly "paw" grows from a writer's earlobe and a grandmother floats silently in the corner of the room.
About the Author
Elvira Navarro won the Community of Madrid's Young Writers Award in 2004. Her first book, La ciudad en invierno (The City in Winter), published in 2007, was well received by the critics, and her second, La ciudad feliz (The Happy City, Hispabooks, 2013) was given the twenty-fifth Jaén Fiction Award and the fourth Tormenta Award for best new author, as well as being selected as one of the books of the year by Culturas, the arts and culture supplement of the Spanish newspaper Público. Granta magazine also named her one of their top twenty-two Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. She contributes to cultural magazines such as El Mundo newspaper's El Cultural, to Ínsula, Letras Libres, Quimera, Turia, and Calle 20, and to the newspapers Público and El País. She writes literary reviews for Qué Leer and contributions for the blog "La tormenta en un vaso." She also teaches creative writing. She lives in France.
Christina MacSweeney received the 2016 Valle Inclan prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, and Among Strange Victims (Daniel Saldaña París) was a finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. Among the other authors she has translated are: Elvira Navarro (A Working Woman), Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Empty Set; Palabras migrantes/Migrant Words), and Julián Herbert (Tomb Song; The House of the Pain of Others). She is currently working on a second novel by Daniel Saldaña París and her translations of a short story collection by Julián Herbert will be published in 2020.