A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales from the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature winner and three-time Booker finalist, Samanta Schweblin. Once a decade a story collection rips a hole in the sky and we remember how it feels to have a spell cast upon us. From Jamaica Kincaid’s In one tale, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring, to go home to her family, only to wish she could go back. In another, a sorrowful father finds himself unable to communicate with his son after a life-changing misfortune occurs under his supervision. In yet another, a dying woman calls a friend she hasn’t spoken to in thirty years--not since an accident which forever changed them both. Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection--but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful. When something seismic happens in our lives, the waves keep coming for years after, with warning or without. Sometimes, all we can do is wait around the corner, ear pressed to the phone receiver, for them to arrive. Fantastical and subtly terrifying, these stories draw on magical realism, psychological fiction, and the dark side of fairy tales inherited from literary predecessors like the Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, far from antiquated or closed off, Schweblin’s worlds invite us in, like quicksand or a strong river’s current. These stories will insinuate themselves into your heart, and your bloodstream....

Autorentext

SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN won the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her story collection Seven Empty Houses. Her debut novel, Fever Dream, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and her novel Little Eyes and story collection Mouthful of Birds have been longlisted for the same prize. Her books have been translated into more than forty languages, and her stories have appeared in English in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Buenos Aires, Schweblin lives in Berlin.

MEGAN MCDOWELL has translated many of the most important Spanish-language writers working today. Her translations have won the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the English PEN Award, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize (four times). In 2020, she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Klappentext

**THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales by Samanta Schweblin, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature and three-time Booker Prize finalist

"The stories of “Good and Evil” are powerfully evocative and unsettling. They seem to hover, indeed like fever dreams, between the reassuring familiarities of domestic life and the stark, unpredictable, visionary flights of the unconscious.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

“The most brilliant writer of short stories writing today, she now delivers her most haunting, fierce and provocative book.”—Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

"Schweblin creates characters whose lifelines reach some of the most extraordinary questions ever articulated in our literature." —Karen Russell, author of The Antidote and Swamplandia!

“Remarkably taut, clear, precise, and yet capable of capturing the extent of our human messiness, these stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin**

The characters of Good and Evil find themselves at a point of no return, dazzled by the glare of impending tragedy. Vulnerable and profoundly human, they become trapped in the instant in which the uncanny has lurched into their lives. Some are transformed, some are isolated, others waver between guilt or tenderness. All of them are driven by uncertainty.

Schweblin’s prose uses tension and truth to construct a literary universe in which the monsters of everyday life come so close to us that we can almost feel their breath. Her writing provokes awe and disquiet, a state of alarm that at the same time transports us to a hypnotic world as recognizable as it is strange.