Staff Pick
An unsettling and disquieting look at a woman's descent into blindness, Lina Meruane's Seeing Red melds autobiography with fiction. Meruane, a New York-based Chilean novelist and lit professor, was awarded the 2013 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (given to Spanish-language women writers) for this work. With a first-person narrative chronicling her own ocular decline, Seeing Red bears witness to the inter- and intrapersonal struggles that force the narrator to make sense of the relationships around her, all while relying upon those very people for support, aid, and comfort. Meruane's gifted prose lends the story both immediacy and persuasiveness. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Meruane's prose has great literary force: it emerges from the hammer blows of conscience, but also from the ungraspable, and from pain." Roberto Bolaño
This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.
Review
"An authentic novel written not from the edges, but from inside the sick body, with a powerful, intense narrator." Gustavo Pablos, Diario La Voz
Review
"A novel where not only the blood pouring from the eyes is palpitating; so is the quality of the literature." El País
Review
"Meruane’s writing is acid, so corrosive that sometimes sentences dissolve before meeting the end that they deserved." Álvaro Enrigue
Synopsis
An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection
"A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop
"A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel
This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.
Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.
"
Synopsis
An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection
Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"
"A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop
"A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel
This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.
Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU."
Synopsis
An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection
Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"
A Foreword Reviews Reviewers' Choice Selection for "14 Favorites of 2016"
"A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." -- Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop
"A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." -- Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel
This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.
Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.
Synopsis
Nominated for the Edinburgh Book Festival First Book Award 2017
An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selectionIncluded in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"
A Foreword Reviews Reviewers' Choice Selection for "14 Favorites of 2016"
"A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." -- Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop
"A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." -- Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel
This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.
Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.
Synopsis
Nominated for the Edinburgh Book Festival First Book Award 2017
One of Publishers Weekly's "10 Essential 21st-Century Spanish-Language Books"
An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection
Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"
A Foreword Reviews Reviewers' Choice Selection for "14 Favorites of 2016"
"A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." -- Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop
"A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." -- Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel
"Funny and frightening, a swift meditation on vision, memory, the human soul itself. Very cinematic in its execution, bold in its content, Seeing Red ultimately forces us to give good thought to the great wonder and blessing that is a properly functioning body." -- On Art & Aesthetics
This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.
Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.
Synopsis
A visceral, moving, haunting English-language debut on illness, the body, and human relationships by one of Chile's brightest young authors
About the Author
Lina Meruane is one of the most prominent female voices in Chilean contemporary narrative. A novelist, essayist, and cultural journalist, she is the author of a host of short stories appeared in various anthologies and magazines in Spanish, English, German and French. She has also published a collection of short stories,
Las Infantas (Chile 1998, Argentina 2010),as well as three novels,
Póstuma (Chile 2000, Portugal 2001),
Cercada (Chile 2000) and
Fruta Podrida (Chile and México 2007). The latter won the Best Unpublished Novel Priza awarded by Chile´s National Council of the Culture and the Arts in 2006. She is the winner of the Anna Seghers Prize, awarded to her by the Akademie der Künste, in Berlin, Germany, 2011. Meruane received the prestigious Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2012 with the publication of her most recent novel,
Sangre en el ojo (Seeing Red).
Meruane has received writing grants from the Arts Development Fund of Chile (1997), the Guggenheim Foundation (2004) and National Endowment for the Arts (2010). Meruane is a cultural journalist, columnist and stringer for written media, and currently serves as editor of Brutas Editoras, an independent publishing house located in New York City. Holder of a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from New York University, Meruane currently teaches World and Latin American Literature and Creative Writing at NYU.
Megan McDowell is a literary translator of many modern and contemporary South American authors, including Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Busqued, Álvaro Bisama, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, Mandorla, and Vice, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile and New York.