Through the Night Like a Snake
$16.95
62 in stock
Additional Info
- ISBN: 978-1-949641-57-8
- Size: 6" x 7"
- Pages: 232
- Publication Date: March 12, 2024
- Distributed By: Publishers Group West
Latin American Horror Stories
A boy explores the abandoned house of a dead fascist…
A leaked sex tape pushes a woman to the brink…
A sex worker discovers a mystifying secret in the pampas…
The mountain fog is not what it seems…
Kermit the Frog dreams of murder…
In ten chilling stories from this ensemble cast of contemporary Latin American writers, horror infiltrates the unexpected, taboo regions of the present-day psyche. Latin American Horror is having a moment. Through the Night Like a Snake, the latest in our Calico series, is an attempt to capture that energy, however eerie or plain terrifying it appears on the page. With writings from celebrated horror practitioners like Mariana Enriquez (Our Share of Night), Mónica Ojeda (Jawbone), Camila Sosa Villada (Bad Girls) and many others, TTNLAS arrives in pitch-perfect English translation, courtesy of translators Sarah Booker, Megan McDowell, Ellen Jones, Kit Maude, Julia Sanches, and others.
Table of Contents
Other
Bone Animals
That Summer in the Dark
Megan McDowell
Megan McDowell has translated work by many of the most important contemporary Latin American writers, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Fonseca, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award for Writing in Translation, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.
Books
Soroche
Sarah Booker
Born in Durham, North Carolina, Sarah Booker is a PhD student in the Romance Studies department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and translation. She translates from Spanish to English and her work has appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Translation Review, and Palabras Errantes, among others. Her translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest was published with the Feminist Press in October 2017.
Books
In the Mountains
Ellen Jones
Ellen Jones is a literary translator from Spanish to English, an editor, and an occasional writer based in Mexico City. Her book Language in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. You can find her at www.ellencjones.com.
Books
The Third Transformation
Visitor
Joel Streicker
Joel Streicker’s stories have appeared in a number of journals, including Blood Orange Review, Great Lakes Review, Gravel, and Burningword. He has published poetry in English and Spanish, including the collection El amor en los tiempos de Belisario. His translations of such Latin American writers as Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Pilar Quintana have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney’s, and other journals. Streicker’s essays have appeared in The Forward and Shofar, among other publications.
Books
The Man with the Leg
Rabbits
Lisa Dillman
Lisa Dillman is based in Atlanta, where she teaches at Emory University. She is translator of some thirty novels, including those of Yuri Herrera, Pilar Quintana, Sabina Berman and Andrés Barba.
Books
Lazarus the Vulture
Julia Sanches
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Dolores Reyes, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words Without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica. A founding member of Cedilla & Co., Julia sits on the Council of the Authors Guild.
Books
The House of Compassion
Kit Maude
Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of Latin American writers for a wide array of publications and writes reviews for Ñ, Otra Parte, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Books
Praise
A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 (Literary Hub)
“These stories — relentlessly unsettling as they are — serve as a fantastic introduction to a growing movement that’s bound to enrich, and help diversify, speculative fiction for years to come.”
—Gabino Iglesias, New York Times
“Short stories are still one of the best ways for readers to discover new voices. This collection brings together powerhouses like Argentina’s Mariana Enriquez and rising stars such as Ecuador’s Mónica Ojeda.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The latest in Two Lines’ terrific Calico imprint, dedicated to bringing yet-untranslated stories and writers into English in community. This one rides a wave of interest in Latin American horror and features stories from translation sensations like Mariana Enriquez and Monica Ojeda as well as writers making their English-translation debut. It’s guaranteed to be a weird, unsettling, and beautiful collection.”
—Literary Hub
“Through the Night Like a Snake establishes a set of central tenets of the burgeoning Latin American Horror genre: a commitment to the voices of marginalized women, an often overt drawing from a bloody history, and a mode of horror that turns away from supernatural traditions and towards realistic anxieties from modern life. However, the stories here are not exhausted by the above criteria; certain inclusions slither into uncharted territories that are seemingly Ibero-American only by coincidence. Latin American Literature in translation is—Post-Boom—as popular as it has ever been, and the fact that this Aleph-like collection exists is testament to the recent successes of this emerging genre.”
—The Rumpus
“Ten eerie stories by ten writers (via twelve translators) comprise the ninth volume in boutique press Two Lines’ Calico Series. Notable title pages for each story in pixelated reds featuring the opening lines in original Spanish cleverly underscore each fright-fest that follows.”
—Booklist
“Chilling…This eerie selection of exciting contemporary voices is sure to keep readers up at night.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Feeling both classic and somehow brand-new, these stories give us a particular vision of horror that is contemporary, exhilarating, and truly terrifying.”
—Southwest Review
“Atmospheric and chilling throughout, this is an essential collection for any literary horror enthusiast. My favorite of the Calico series (so far).”
—Gary Lovely, Prologue Bookshop (Columbus, OH)
“A solid, satisfying collection of horror and dark unusuality, each story inhabits its own singular realm of the blackly fantastical.”
—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s (Portland, OR)
“I was drawn to this anthology because of the names I am already familiar with, authors that I deeply adore and respect for their craft, but I left it scouring for any other translated works by the entire ensemble. Every voice in this collection is unique; some are sharp and quick, some melt into the terror slowly, and some handle their terror with such unflinching confidence you can’t recognize it until it’s too late. I will be thinking forever of bone animals, The Man with The Leg, dogs that crash cars, a face scraped against bricks, and Kermit the Frog.”
—Skye Euryale, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI)
“Ambitiously diverse collection of Latin American horror. The stories feel young and vibrant and frustrated and punchy, as if their authors are staring at a world that is shaking apart and beginning to slip away and who knows what comes next.”
—Douglas Riggs, Bank Square Books (Mystic, CT)
Praise for the Calico Series
“By turns cryptic and revealing, phantasmagorical and straightforward, these tales balance reality and fantasy on the edge of a knife.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review of That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fiction
“Unbelievably exciting…These are poems to read and reread, repeating the lines as though they were a secret between yourself and the page.”
—The Paris Review on Home: New Arabic Poems
“Essential, a gift that opens up the pleasures of new worlds.”
—Hugh Raffles on Elemental: Earth Stories
“This eclectic bilingual anthology from queer Brazilian writers, both living and dead, is as expansive and full of life as the country itself…enticing and poignant.”
—Publishers Weekly on Cuíer: Queer Brazil
“Visible approaches translation as an act that occurs not only between languages but also between media and disciplines…Thoughtfully curated…Past and present come together in a refreshingly collaborative spirit.”
—Brooklyn Rail on Visible
Additional Materials
- “Latin American Horror Stories: An Interview with Sarah Booker, Lisa Dillman, & Noelle de la Paz,” in Southwest Review
- “Four New Horror Books Spiked with Dread and Profound Unease,” in the New York Times
- “A Horror That Cannot be Helped: Review,” in The Rumpus
- Through the Night Like a Snake Reader’s Guide
- Request an Exam or Desk Copy
- Cuentero Productions audio adaptation of “Soroche”:
Excerpt
“Our routine was simple. During the day we tried to get cool in the shade, and if that didn’t work, we swam in the pool; we never sunbathed. At dusk we sat on the sidewalk or in the plaza, and if by some miracle one of us had gotten our hands on batteries, we’d listen to music on the tape deck. I missed music more than anything; my meticulously labeled cassettes were dead in their drawer because even if the electricity came back at night I could listen for only a few hours—people in the house had to sleep, and my headphones were broken and I couldn’t buy new ones. If neither of us had batteries, which was more often the case, we read our serial killer book out loud in the plaza in front of the unstable cathedral, smoking cigarettes stolen from fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts.”
—from “That Summer in the Dark” by Mariana Enriquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell