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Winner of the O. Henry Prize for the story "The Mad People of Paris"
These revelatory short stories tread the line between surrealism and realism with strange, appealing characters who take on a sacrifice in spite of themselves.A followup to his first novel,
The Night (winner of the Rive Gauche à Paris Prize for foreign books in 2016), this collection of short stories by Venezuelan literary star Rodrigo Blanco Calderón features a taxidermist painter, a blind man lost in Mexico City, a female motorcyclist who rides naked through the night, a foreigner who learns a language making confessions in Paris churches, and a dying pilot who finds peace in a reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Impeccable and masterful in his storytelling, Blanco Calderón constructs a nocturnal cast of characters who become the victims and executioners of a sacrifice in the midst of a floundering Venezuela, others with the threat of terrorism in France, or in a Mexico symbolizing the first shots of the revolution.
About the author
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is a writer and editor. He has received various awards for his stories both inside and outside Venezuela. In 2007 he was invited to join the Bogotá39 group, which brings together the best Latin American narrators under thirty-nine years old. In 2013 he was a guest writer on the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2014, his story “Emuntorios” was included in
Thirteen Crime Stories from Latin America, volume number 46 of the prestigious magazine
McSweeney's. With his first novel,
The Night, he won the 2016 Paris Rive Gauche Prize, the Critics Award in Venezuela and the 2019 Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Prize.
Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, including Agustín Fernández Mallo, María Gainza, and Enrique Vila-Matas, and his own writing has appeared in publications such as
Brixton Review of Books,
LitHub, and
The White Review. He is a former co-editor of the translation journal
In Other Words and currently a Royal Literary Fellow, teaching at Aberystwyth University (2021-2023).
Summary
Winner of the O. Henry Prize for the story "The Mad People of Paris"
These revelatory short stories tread the line between surrealism and realism with strange, appealing characters who take on a sacrifice in spite of themselves.
A followup to his first novel, The Night (winner of the Rive Gauche à Paris Prize for foreign books in 2016), this collection of short stories by Venezuelan literary star Rodrigo Blanco Calderón features a taxidermist painter, a blind man lost in Mexico City, a female motorcyclist who rides naked through the night, a foreigner who learns a language making confessions in Paris churches, and a dying pilot who finds peace in a reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Impeccable and masterful in his storytelling, Blanco Calderón constructs a nocturnal cast of characters who become the victims and executioners of a sacrifice in the midst of a floundering Venezuela, others with the threat of terrorism in France, or in a Mexico symbolizing the first shots of the revolution.
Additional text
"Rodrigo Blanco Calderón is one of the most ambitious narrative voices of his generation. His prose is violent and unrelenting. Effective. Sordid." —Karina Sáinz Borgo
