January

January is the story of a 16-year-old farmworker named Nefer. In the Argentine pampas, all things bow to Nefer. Reeds nod when she digs her heels into her horse, unripe peaches snap and fall as she gallops past. Sickly-sweet air bends, churns in Nefer’s throat. Nefer measures the distance between her body and the table, […]

The Scent of Buenos Aires

Hebe Uhart’s stories sneak up on you. Refreshingly approachable, they are punctuated by street talk and saturated with a cryptic wit that recalls Lydia Davis. In The Scent of Buenos Aires, Uhart renders moments at the zoo, the hair salon, or a homeowners association meeting with delightfully eccentric insight. These stories cast an unusual, intimate […]

The Joyful Song of the Partridge

No one knows where Maria das Dores came from. Did she ride in on the armored spines of crocodiles, was she carried many miles in the jaws of fish? The only clear fact is that she is here, sitting naked in the river bordering a town where nothing ever happens. The townspeople murmur restlessly that […]

The Brush

Pablo Rodríguez steps thirteen paces out into the night and buries a wooden box. Its contents: a chain, a medallion, a few overexposed photographs, and finally, a deed. He burrows into the ground without knowing quite why, but with the certainty of a heavy change pressing through the air, of fear settling “like a cat […]

What Kingdom

Fine Gråbøl’s narrator dreams of furniture flickering to life. A chair that greets you, shiny tiles that follow a peculiar grammar, or a bookshelf that can be thrown on like an apron. Fine’s narrator is obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives. She lives in a […]

A Question of Belonging

“It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes,” Hebe Uhart writes in the opening story of A Question of Belonging, a collection of texts that traverse Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Spain, and beyond. Discoveries sprout and flower throughout Uhart’s oeuvre, but nowhere more so than in her crónicas, […]

Tali Girls

At a time when global powers debate whether to legitimize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by acknowledging it, and Afghan women, periodically a cause célèbre, have again been forgotten from the world’s consciousness and priorities, Siamak Herawi brings them centerstage in his novel Tali Girls and takes us deep into the heart of his motherland […]

Maureen Shaughnessy at Annie Bloom’s Books

[…] Buenos Aires.   Maureen Shaughnessy’s translations have been published by World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Asymptote and The Antioch Review. Her translation of Hebe Uhart’s selected stories, The Scent of Buenos Aires, is forthcoming from Archipelago Books in October 2019. She lives in Bariloche, Argentina. Hebe Uhart’s stories sneak up on you. Refreshingly approachable, they are punctuated by street talk […]