Things We Lost in the Fire | Granta

  • Published: 04/10/2018
  • ISBN: 9781846276361
  • 129x20mm
  • 208 pages

Things We Lost in the Fire

Mariana Enriquez

Translated by Megan McDowell

Thrilling and terrifying, Things We Lost in the Fire takes the reader into a world of Argentine Gothic. A world of sharp-toothed children and young girls racked by desire, where demons lurk beneath the river and stolen skulls litter the pavements. A world where the secrets half-buried under Argentina’s terrible dictatorship rise up to haunt the present day, and where women, exhausted by a plague of violence, find that their only path out lies in the flames…

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Bright with brilliance... The stories [create] a sensibility as distinctive as that found in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. They are a portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades

John Self, Guardian

An utterly brilliant measure of deep existential terror ... you [will] return home looking pale and haunted

‘Best Summer Books’ selected by Mark O’Connell, Observer

Slim but phenomenal... The spookiness of these 12 stories sets into the reader's mind like a jet stone, sparkling through all that darkness

Vanity Fair

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 The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Our Share of Night was awarded the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela.

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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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From the Same Author

Mariana Enriquez on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Granta 144

Mariana Enríquez | Notes on Craft

Mariana Enriquez

‘I found a way to speak: the women talked for me’ Translated by Josie Mitchell.

Fiction | Granta 144

The Intoxicated Years

Mariana Enríquez

‘They cried as if they weren’t to blame for any of it. We hated innocent people.’

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