
Our Dead World
Liliana Colanzi(Author)
Dalkey Archive Press
Will be published approx. on 13. July 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
114 pages
978-1-943150-11-3 (ISBN)
Description
A young woman suffers a mental breakdown because of her repressive and religious mother. A group of children is fascinated by the sudden death of a friend. A drug trafficking couple visits Paris at the same time as a psychopathic cannibal. A mysterious wave travels through a university campus, driving students to suicide. A photographer witnesses a family's surface composure shatter during a portrait session. A worker on Mars sees ghostly animals in the desert and longs for an impossible return to Earth. A plastic surgeon botches an operation and hides on a sugar cane plantation where indigenous slavery is practiced.
Horror and the fantastic mark the unstable realism of Our Dead World, in which altered states of consciousness, marginalized peoples, animal bodies, and tensions between tradition and modernity are recurring themes. Liliana Colanzi's stories explore those moments when the civilized voice of the ego gives way to the buzzing of the subconscious, and repressed indigenous history destabilizes the colonial legacy still present in contemporary Latin America.
Horror and the fantastic mark the unstable realism of Our Dead World, in which altered states of consciousness, marginalized peoples, animal bodies, and tensions between tradition and modernity are recurring themes. Liliana Colanzi's stories explore those moments when the civilized voice of the ego gives way to the buzzing of the subconscious, and repressed indigenous history destabilizes the colonial legacy still present in contemporary Latin America.
Reviews / Votes
An unpredictable, formally inventive collection of stories * Kirkus Reviews * In this short book, Colanzi offers an extraordinary density of ideas, transmitted in shape-shifting and affecting prose. The translator, Jessica Sequiera, deserves immense credit for her deft rendering of this complex work. * Dublin Review of Books * a seamless blend of folklore, magic realism, and speculative fiction that transcends the limitations of nationality, probing the depths of a universal, painfully human, consciousness. * The Arts Fuse * Colanzi has an utterly unique voice, and one which is destined for further success. * Bookmunch *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Normal, IL
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
ISBN-13
978-1-943150-11-3 (9781943150113)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia, 1981) has published the story collections Permanent Vacation (2010) and Our Dead World (2014). In 2015 she won the Aura Estrada Prize, awarded to writers under 35 years old living in the United States or Mexico. Colanzi is considered by critics to be one of the most promising voices of the new Latin American narrative, and this book is an ambitious formal and thematic leap. Jessica Sequeira is a writer and translator. She holds an M.Phil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.