Blood Red
Published on 17. November 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
192 pages
978-1-63206-330-4 (ISBN)
Description
The exhilarating English-language debut from celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red centers the female body in a radical exploration of desire, choice, and consequences.
In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations-until its abrupt absence changes everything.
Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray-or red-zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one's body, revels in the narrator's autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.
In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations-until its abrupt absence changes everything.
Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray-or red-zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one's body, revels in the narrator's autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.
Reviews / Votes
"The strength of excess and overconsumption. The accelerated, irregular heartbeat of prose that attacks from all angles and doesn't let the reader breathe, basking in its own exquisiteness."-Jose Andres Bayas, Radio Cocoa
"The narrator and protagonist of Blood Red... is wild. She bleeds, she runs, she separates herself. She bites, she gets drunk, she rollerskates, she sleeps around, she gets pregnant... in sum, she lives. Following her through caves and bodies is an exercise in risk."
-Xavi Ayen, La Vanguardia
"Blood Red could be characterized by its multiplicity and a profoundly provocative spirit were it not futile to put a label on it. Those who make it to the end (which is not difficult, as it is a dizzying, captivating read) will find that everything can be doubted, especially in relationships. This impulse puts the novel in the trend of bold, fascinating contemporary narratives by Latin American women writers."
-Gabriela Toro, La periodica
"Before all else it is an exploration of femininity, of the female body as a metaphor of living and savage nature, of menstruation, of insanity, of desire, of sex-of this hole that is the uterus, amputating maternities."
-Ariana Basciani, The Objective
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 177 mm
Width: 124 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
200 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-63206-330-4 (9781632063304)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Gabriela Ponce (Quito, 1977) is a fiction writer, playwright and theater director, as well as a professor of performing arts at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. In 2015, she published her first book Antropofaguitas, which was considered the best book of short stories by the Ministry of Culture. In 2019, she published the novel Sanguinea (Severo Editorial), also published in Spain by Editorial Candaya, which was awarded the Gallegos Lara prize by the Municipality of Quito for Best Novel of the Year. In 2020, she published Solo hay un jardin: en el fondo de todo hay un jardin (La Caida editorial) a compilation of her plays. She is part of Mitomana, performing arts collective and co-founder of the cultural venue Casa Mitomana. She is on the editorial board of Sycorax magazine.
Sarah Booker (North Carolina, 1989) is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Press, 2022) and Monica Ojeda's Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, The Baffler, and Nashville Review. She lives in North Carolina.
Sarah Booker (North Carolina, 1989) is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Press, 2022) and Monica Ojeda's Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, The Baffler, and Nashville Review. She lives in North Carolina.