Published: 01/04/2021
ISBN: 9781783786718
Granta Books
208 pages

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Translated by Megan McDowell

‘Mariana Enriquez is a mesmerizing writer who demands to be read. Like Bolaño, she is interested in matters of life and death, and her fiction hits with the full force of a train’ – Dave Eggers

Welcome to Buenos Aires, a city thrumming with murderous intentions and morbid desires, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. These brilliant, unsettling tales of revenge, witchcraft, fetishes, disappearances and urban madness spill over with women and girls whose dark inclinations will lead them over the edge.

After you've lived in Enriquez's marvellous brain for the time it takes to read The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, the known world feels ratcheted a few degrees off centre. Smoky, carnal and dazzling

Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

I loved these twisted, lustful whispers in the dark. There is serious power in this writing

Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

A weird and wonderful exploration of contemporary horror - cities falling apart, society turning on itself, the loneliness of the internet age. But more than that: these stories are fun. Wild, triggering, sinister, button-pushing fun

Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies

The Author

Mariana Enriquez is an award-winning Argentine novelist and journalist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is the author of Things We Lost in the Fire, and her novel Our Share of the Night, which was awarded the prestigious 2019 Premio Herralde de Novela, will be published by Granta Books in 2022.

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The Translator

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the English PEN award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, and the Shirley Jackson Prize, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Photograph © Camila Valdés

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