Synopses & Reviews
Laura Rivera can't believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters. Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out.
Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador.
A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya's relentless, obsessive narrator — female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable — paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse.
Review
"The only writer of my generation who knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time." Roberto Bolano, author of 2666 and The Savage Detectives
Review
"To read Dance With Snakes or The She-Devil in the Mirror is — in a small way — to understand how Castellanos Moya felt when he returned to El Salvador on the cusp of civil war: like an extraterrestrial in the country he called home." Natasha Wimmer, The Nation (read the entire )
Synopsis
Salvadorean society is shocked by the gruesome murder of a young upper-class woman, and no one more so than her best friend Laura. In her first-person solo narration, Laura rattles on and on about her disbelief and horror at the evils all around her-but who's that in the mirror?
Synopsis
Castellanos Moya sSenselessness was acclaimed an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art (Village Voice) and a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials (Russell Banks). "
Synopsis
A wealthy is up to dastardly deeds in this send-up of Latin-America's high-society.
About the Author
Horacio Castellanos Moya was born 1957 in Honduras. He has lived in San Salvador, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico (where he spent ten years as a journalist, editor, and political analyst), Spain, and Germany. In 1988 he won the National Novel Prize from Central American University for his first novel. His work has been published and translated in England, Germany, El Salvador and Costa Rica. He has published nine novels and is now living in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Katherine Silver has won a PEN Translation Fund Award, an NEA grant, and a Black Mountain Institute/Rainmakers Grant.