Read more
A tolerable, ordinary life: an adequate, if boring, freelance job; reliably irritating video calls with your sister; half-hearted plans for the future (a writing residency, a child); and, in the middle of your half-furnished apartment, an enormous crate. Unopened, delivered days ago, and getting in the way. In The Delivery, what's inside is your estranged mother, and her arrival brings to a head the tentative motions you've made to examine the past and the subtle fissures in the life you've built. Semi-ordinary happenings take on an otherworldly cast when you look at them sideways, but nothing is stranger, in this place far from home, than the tenuous bonds of family that hold us together, or don't.
About the author
Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia, and now lives in Buenos Aires where she teaches creative writing and works as a journalist and scriptwriter. She is the author of several novels, including
Hasta que pase un huracán (
Waiting for a Hurricane ) and
Educación Sexual (
Sexual Education, both included in
Fish Soup ),
Holiday Heart, and
Lo que no aprendí (The Things I have Not Learnt). She is also the author of a book of autobiographical essays
Primera Persona (First Person, forthcoming with Charco Press) and several collections of short stories, including
Worse Things, which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014 (also included in
Fish Soup ).
TheDelivery is her third book to appear in English after the very successful
Fish Soup (selected by the TLS as one of the best fiction titles of 2018) and
Holiday Heart (Winner of the English PEN Award).
Megan McDowell is a literary translator focusing on contemporary Latin American authors. Her translations include works by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, and Diego Zuñiga. Her short story translations have appeared in
The New Yorker,
The Paris Review,
Tin House,
McSweeney's,
Granta, and the
Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her translation of Alejandro Zambra's
Ways of Going Home won an English PEN Translates award (2013), and her English version of
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. She has been awarded residencies by the Banff International Translation Centre (Canada), Looren Translation House (Switzerland) and Art Omi (USA). She currently lives in Santiago, Chile.
