Charco Press
vydavateľstvo
One Hundred Guinea Pigs
Friendship makes life worth living, and worth ending too. Eufrasia Vela is a caregiver—it’s not just her job. But when she begins working with Dona Carmen, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days staring out the window at her now-obstructed view of the sea, she confronts the limits to her ability to help. That is, until Dona Carmen makes a big, last request: to transform her caretaking from helping her stay alive to helping her die. A good death has much in common with a good life, after all, and incapacity, loneliness, and isolation are devastations that a compassionate friend can help ease. Dignity, community, respect, and generosity—they’re what Eufrasia offers her clients, and what their friendship offers her. One Hundred Guinea Pigs is the lifegiving, warmhearted novel about euthanasia you didn’t know you needed.
El gato en el remolino
Una novela experimental y utópica que narra el nacimiento, la vida y la muerte de una conciencia colectiva. "Lo que quiero decir es que la locura es un derecho". Así comienza El Gato en el remolino , una novela experimental y utópica que relata la historia del surgimiento, desarrollo y extinción de una conciencia colectiva conocida como el Animal. El libro cuenta la historia de un mundo que resulta a la vez deseable y aterrador a lo largo de los próximos 377 anos. Comienza en medio del relato. En el Caribe. Avanza lentamente, siguiendo con rigor la forma de un espiral narrativo a través de ciclos de destrucción. Luego regresa a nuestro presente, para que podamos contemplar cómo nuestro mundo se transforma en aquel otro. Su protagonista es una conciencia colectiva: el Animal. Nace. Crece y aprende. Muere. Es llorado por diosas cibernéticas. También grita: !La soledad es una enfermedad colectiva! !Defendamos nuestro derecho a la locura! !Valientes no son quienes resisten, sino quienes se atreven a soltar!The post-colonial birth, life, and death of the collective consciousness known as the Animal. Middle-aged streamer twins in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, are the first human beings to successfully connect—sharing their consciousness across 34 translucent cables. In that moment, the Animal is born, an intracerebral force that quickly grows to encompass anthills of synaptically entwined bodies, a floating library kitchen redolent of rice and beans far above the Mississippi river, and a transhuman compound in a future Cuba on the Isle of Youth. Circling back and forth and ever progressing, Animal Spiral moves through 400 years of human, and then post-human history, beginning with a revolution on the streets of San Juan and ending with five brilliant siblings: the Squash (humanoid), Calima (beetles), Yemayá (eels), Coatlicue (serpents), and Juracán (anthropomorphic birds), who have millions of bodies and all the world’s intelligence, but only want to no longer be alone. This is a buoyant, joyous ode to possibility, a warning about the dangers of neglecting what makes us human, and an astonishing exercise of the flexibility and capacity of liminal spaces. Loneliness is a collective disease! We defend our right to madness! Brave are not the ones who resist; brave are the ones who let go!
Cathedrals
Lia fled her home after a brutal crime decades ago, but family, and the truth, will never let you go.Thirty years ago, in an empty plot of a quiet neighbourhood, a teenage girl's body was found quartered and burned. The investigation ended with no arrests and her family – middle class, educated, Catholic – quietly disintegrated. Three decades later, the hidden truth comes to light thanks to the father's enduring love for the victim. That truth will reveal the raw realities lurking behind appearances, the cruelty of those who prioritize obedience and religious fanaticism, the complicity of the fearful and the indifferent, and the loneliness and desperation of those who seek to follow their own path, ignoring the dictates of their elders.Just as she did with Elena Knows and A Little Luck , Claudia Pineiro delves into family ties, social prejudice, and the ideologies and institutions that affect our inner worlds to deliver a brave, moving novel that strikes at the heart of these private dramas.
Pinen
A fierce, tender collection of stories about the lives, traumas, and dreams of Mapuche youth in modern-day Chile.Jesús, Valeska, Yajaira, and Ale are some of the vivid characters that inhabit the stories told in Pinen , a book that casts an unflinching gaze on the stark margins of urban life. Within its pages unfold the bullet-ridden death of a big shot from the blocks; the fraught, often violated sexuality of women in a displaced community; the unwavering bond between two friends navigating the waria ; the toxicity that seeps through youth and the distances that inevitably come with growing up; and, finally, a fierce declaration of love to the clandestine spirit of a brother. These are young lives that drift through the many peripheries of the city carrying a hope as immense as the injustice that defines their days.The stories that make up Pinen invite the reader into an intimate, often overlooked space – those small, enclosed rooms where the everyday tragedies of the many silently unfold. With brutal realism and lyrical restraint, Daniela Catrileo renders these acts of courage and violence with masterful precision, granting voice and presence to those rarely seen in literature.
X Is Where I Am
A searching, buoyant novel about queer love, mothers and daughters, and making a life in the face of the only constant: loss. Every story is a love story. In a Barcelona redolent with Almodóvar vibes, the love is between women: overlapping and messy attachments between friends, young lovers, mothers and daughters. As Sara’s mother dies, her daughter is in bed with a new obsession. She’s wracked with guilt, but the persistence of need, the demands of the body, refuse to take a dignified pause for the observance of another body leaving this world. If one of the projects of growing up is being defeated by the limits of control we have over ourselves and others, the frustration of trying and failing to be understood, then Sara’s loss, her lovers, and her longterm girlfriend are her passage from 28 and casting about to a little bit older and a little bit more sorted out. If love is “more like a quagmire than anything else—sometimes sombre, sometimes blinded by light,” then X Is Where I Am is one young woman’s fractious, hopeful, attempt to give in to it.
Apparitions
Two nuns, and one obsessed mother, doing everything in their power to achieve communion with the one they love. Sister Lugarda de la Encarnación takes the lash, and an unnamed mother gets down on her hands and knees – sacramental postures demanded by inscrutable men. Apparitions is a novel of ecstasy pursued, desire transmogrified into devotion, and obedience as a passionately pursued, not entirely free choice. Erotic, and suffused with painting, music, art, it’s an incantatory exploration of what it means to abandon the world, and to use your body – in pain, and in pleasure – as a way of finally coming to know the divine.
The Dance and the Fire
In a gripping new novel by acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldana París, three friends forever bound by erotic flames of the past reunite in a city engulfed by wildfires and an ecstatic dancing plague. After years apart, three high school friends return to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where an intense love triangle left an indelible mark on their adolescence. The city, claustrophobic as wildfires press closer, reawakens the past and confronts them with their present: the entanglement of friendship and desire, the seemingly distant discovery of sexuality, complex parental relationships, and the daunting task of artistic fulfilment. In the background, forces of chaos and destruction are a constant presence. As fires ravage the physical landscape, one of the friends begins choreographing an ecstatic dance inspired by the German Expressionist Mary Wigman and medieval Danse Macabre. What starts as a coping mechanism for the anxieties of disappearing youth and climate catastrophe becomes an overpowering, all-consuming hysteria. Mysterious powers are awakened, the boundary between reality and myth begins to blur, and the friends find themselves immersed in an increasingly turbulent and uncertain universe.
An Infinite Sadness
A novel of ideas, both introspective and brutal, inspired by the works of Robert Musil, W. G. Sebald and Hermann Broch.Shortly after the end of World War II, Nicolas, a young French psychiatrist, is invited to work at a hospital in Switzerland, and moves to a nearby village with his wife Anna. Known for its humane treatment methods, the hospital accepts patients from all over Europe. Nicolas rejects treatments like electroshock therapy, preferring to talk with his patients until something is uncovered?either in the patient?s unconscious mind or his own.In these conversations, various war wounds are brought to the surface, in a delicately balanced game combining trust and madness. The young psychiatrist confronts the demons of historical guilt and seeks to reconcile his materialism with spirituality. Set against the backdrop of the development of the first drugs to treat depression and other mental illnesses, and while discussing issues that are still pertinent to our times, this touching novel forces us to confront past traumas and, above all, to face our fears for the future.Although the story takes place in 1950s Europe, it is also a meditation on the contemporary mental health crisis and a metaphor for the lingering of fascist ideas around the world, with specific references to present-day Brazil.
Restoration
Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong.Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room?scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks?the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room?Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what?s behind our own barred door.
On Earth As It Is Beneath
On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison?s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls. Ana Paula Maia has once again delivered a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for the consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. No crime is committed out of view for this novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witness.
Chilco
A near-future tale about love, life, and friendship in a world that’s falling apart. Chilco is the name of Pascale’s home island. It is also the Mapudungun word for fuchsia: a word that evokes tropical lushness, wetness, the deep greenness of the forest. Pascale's partner, Marina, grew up in the vertical slums of Capital City, a place scarred by centuries of colonialism and now the ravages of feckless developers. Every day the couple fear a sinkhole will open up and take with it another poor neighbourhood, another raft of desperate refugees from the hinterlands: the indigenous, the poor, who are toiling for an all-consuming machine that is devouring the earth from beneath their feet. When they finally flee the collapsing city to live in Chilco, are they escaping from the crushing weight of centuries of colonial repression that have eroded indigenous memories, language, and culture, or are they merely stepping into a twisted, lush new version of it? From her first days in this place where she’s supposed to feel safe and at home, Marina can’t avoid the feeling that everything is decaying around her—there is a smell of putrefaction in the air that no one except her can detect; there are seismic rifts that the political cruelties of the times have opened up in her own relationship with Pascale; and she is haunted by insistent memories of her past. In Chilco , Daniela Catrileo’s baroque, tropical jeremiad, the wounds of capitalism and empire inflict themselves on the person and on the land, but linger most devastatingly in language and memory. Indigenous Mapudungun and Quechua words, history, and cosmology form the chorus to this tropical fever dream of life, love, death, and friendship.
The World We Saw Burning
Matías Roeder, a young man with an Italian father, German mother, and a sense of stagnation he is desperate to escape from, hops a boat from Peru to New York with vague plans but a firm intention to never go home again. This familiar story of migration—the odd jobs, the romances, the Bowery bars—goes sideways when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and he joins the US Air Force as part of a bombing crew. Matías is now Matthew, in the belly of a B-17, remade by the vertigo and rawness of aerial warfare. But the past comes roaring back when he trains his sights on his beloved grandfather’s hometown of Hamburg. Matías’s reckoning unfolds in the interstices of other stories, swapped by two more Peruvians – a journalist and a cabdriver – stuck in a present-day Madrid traffic jam, whose lives in Lima are now as distant as World War II was to their homeland. The World We Saw Burning is both a striking account of war and a reflection on identity and uprootedness in a time when everything seems on the verge of exploding or disappearing forever.
Cautery
Fantasies, or are they premonitions, of a great wave, an impending apocalypse, threaten to swamp a young woman trapped in a slowly curdling relationship. From the outside it all looks good – the casually elegant apartment, the cocktail parties, the impressive, creative friends – but for all her supposed freedom, her unhappiness means she’s not living up to her side of the bargain. Why, everyone asks, is this not enoug? our hundred years earlier, formidable, irascible Deborah Moody marries, is disappointed, is widowed, loses a child, loses everything, and flees England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She finds her fortune there, but if relying on a husband proved a mistake, independence doesn’t mean freedom from the dangerous vanities of men.Funny, cutting, and a savage indictment of the cheap consolations of meme-ified faux feminism, misplaced solidarity, and sacrifices for the supposed greater good, Cautery offers us two women (one based on a historical figure, one imagined) who share a final vision of true happiness – burning it all down and beginning again.
The National Telepathy
In September 1933, the Peruvian Rubber Company delivers nineteen indigenous people from the Amazon to businessman Amado Dam, intended for Argentina''s first Ethnographic Theme Park. Unexpected among the human cargo is an artefact harbouring a sloth with a fascinating yet terrifying secret: the ability to create erotically explosive telepathic connections between people. What ensues is a raucous satire of men?s fear of women?s bodies, of the illusion of logic in the structures of so-called civilisation, and the way class and race obscure identities when the observer is a man with power.In The National Telepathy , Roque Larraquy, one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentinian literature, brings us a literary high-wire act, an over-the-top comic grotesque about atrocity. This shocking, bizarre, funny, imaginative novel lays all-too-bare the secret longings and not-so-secret machinations of a social class that will stop at nothing in order to stay on top.
Lexicon of Affinities
A prowl through words reveals the unstable character of the cosmos.With entries as varied as ?elbow?, ?Ophelia?, ?progress?, the painter Giorgio Morandi, ?chess?, ?Eulalia? (a friend of the author?s aunt), and ?unicorn?, Ida Vitale constructs a dictionary of her long and passionately engaged artistic life. Taking the reader by the arm, she invites us to become her confidant, sharing her remarkable 20th century as a member of a storied generation of Latin American writers, of whom she is the last remaining alive. It?s a compendium of friendship, travel, reading, and the endless opportunities she found for ''the joyful possibility of creation.'' Like every dictionary, Lexicon of Affinities seeks to impose order on chaos, even if in its exuberant, whimsical profusion it lays bare the unstable character of the cosmos.
Restauracion
Restauración es la escalofriante historia de terror de una joven restauradora atrapada entre los recuerdos de una vieja casona de la Ciudad de México y los siniestros planes de un fotógrafo obsesionado con recrear los escenarios de la novela Farabeuf , de Salvador Elizondo. La novela lleva al extremo la idea del amor como sacrificio. En ella, el dano, el menosprecio y la crueldad se oponen al cuidado, la abnegación y la entrega absoluta, como parte de un complejo juego de seducción, dependencia emocional y autoengano. Mientras la protagonista se afana por recuperar la casa que perteneció a la familia del hombre a quien ama con la esperanza de salvar su relación, va develando los aterradores secretos que anticipan su propio destino. Como en el cuento clásico de Barba Azul , la protagonista abre una por una las habitaciones, dando vida a la memoria de la casa y a los fantasmas que la habitaron. Una estructura compleja, una prosa profunda y una tensión constante van conduciendo al lector hasta llegar ante la puerta de la habitación prohibida y ponen la llave en su mano. En Restauración , las historias de dos generaciones se entrelazan para poner de manifiesto algunos de los conflictos que han vivido las mujeres en el pasado reciente, y confrontarlos con la actualidad. Al focalizar la narración en la perspectiva de las mujeres y hacer hincapié en su problemática, la novela cuestiona la manera en que la literatura ha silenciado, idealizado o invisibilizado al personaje femenino durante siglos. Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong.Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room – scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks – the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked roo? estoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what’s behind our own barred door.
Vypredané
15,99 €