Enfermario
Gabriela Torres Olivares
Fiction, Translation | $17.00
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-65-3
Size: 5.25 in. x 8 in.
Pages: 144
Binding: Softcover, Perfect
National Release: June 13, 2017
Translated by Jennifer Donovan
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What does it mean to be? And to be different? Gabriela Torres Olivares poses these questions as she writes in the space between her characters’ bodies, desires, and experiences. With a constantly shifting gaze, these fifteen stories explore the profundity of otherness across beings and quasi beings, seeking out both discomfort and common ground. In her Enfermario, part infirmary and part bestiary, Gabriela Torres Olivares invites us into her characters’ worlds only to defamiliarize the quotidian and thus challenge our most basic preconceptions.
The playful darkness that looms over Gabriela Torres Olivares’ writing is vivid and breathtaking, both dreamlike and weirdly alive, like a bedtime story whispered in the ear. Enfermario is a miniature gem of modern Mexican gothic.
–Pola Oloixarac
Gabriela Torres Olivares is one of my favorite living writers; her sentences are devastating, beautiful, utterly desired, and then, are like the skin that needs to be shed off in cycles. After all, we are reptilian. The words are wounds and portals, and her narratives somehow puncture into the heart of what it means to be a human among other humans, monstrous, touching, apparitions of each other and of the disappearing myths that are still embedded in our bloodstream. The stories in Enfermario exist somehow as the sediment for our current condition, as the evidence of our sad secrets, and as the inflections of our uncanny and everyday cognition.
–Janice Lee