New Spanish Literature in Translation

Motherhood, womanhood, lust, death, madness. There’s a reason so many readers, myself included, are captivated by Ariana Harwicz’s dark and relentlessly good writing. Harwicz is one of the most radical figures in contemporary literature, often compared to Nathalie Sarraute, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Tender is the third and final book in her “Involuntary Trilogy” after Die, My Love and Feebleminded, and it finds us again in the French countryside, this time following Harwicz’s unnamed narrator’s complex and destructive relationship with her teenage son.

I loved Jazmina Barrera’s debut work of nonfiction, On Lighthouses, translated by the legend Christina MacSweeney, where she melds memoir and literary history while examining what lighthouses mean to her and more widely to us all through the the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others. So it’s no surprise that I would love her exploration of pregnancy, motherhood, and art. Like On Lighthouses, it is a memoir and also so much more. Barrera chronicles her own pregnancy and early motherhood while also reflecting on representations of motherhood in art and literature. I was particularly struck by the collection of resources she presents at the back of the book — poems, short stories, interviews, and essays — that she read while breastfeeding. The act of the artist feeding herself as she feeds her child. This urgent and intimate book is one of the most stunning I’ve ever read.

The events of Paradais swirl around the lives of two teenage boys as they decide on a terrifying course of action to change what feels like the inevitability of their lives. Like her impressive and brutal debut novel Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor returns with another devastating examination of violence and inequality. The novel is unsparing in its critique of racism, sexism, classism, violence, and more, and while it’s set within and is speaking to contemporary Mexican society, it is arguably universal. This brilliant and raging Cassandra of a novel is meticulously translated by Sophie Hughes who again captures Melchor’s complex and propulsive style.

Cristina Rivera Garza is in my mind one of the most important writers and thinkers of our time. And so it’s an immense treat to see a collection like this one bring together in English translation stories from across her career, drawing from multiple collections over 30 years, with new writing not yet published in Spanish. If you’ve loved any of her complicated and striking works of fiction, like The Iliac Crest, translated by Sarah Booker, her feminist and gothic examination of gender and language, or The Taiga Syndrome, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, her fairy tale meets contemporary Latin American detective novel, or her new work of nonfiction, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, translated by Sarah Booker, a hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexico border, then you should pick up this collection immediately.

Chilean Poet follows the lives and loves of two Chilean poets across the span of decades. After a chance encounter at a nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Carla now has a 6-year-old son and the three form a new family. Eventually the relationship comes to an end, but we follow the son, Vicente, as he grows up to be a young man and also a lover of poetry. There are many joys of the novel, including Zambra’s fascinating depiction of the Chilean literary scene, a lot of (purposefully) bad poetry, and all of the stylistic inventiveness and wonder that Zambra and acclaimed translator Megan McDowell are known for. A tender and brilliant novel that surprises at every turn, Chilean Poet is a poignant examination of family and art.