Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken-fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history-with bracing urgency. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. She is the author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Mariana Enriquez is an award-winning Argentine novelist and journalist, whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Following the "propulsive and mesmerizing" (New York Times Book Review) Things We Lost in the Fire comes a new collection of singularly unsettling stories, by an Argentine author who has earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges.
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