Today, we’re going to revisit a wild TMR season in which we featured three books originally written in Spanish, all published right around the start of the pandemic . . . Below, you’ll find info and links to all the episodes on��Cars on Fire��by Mónica Ramón Ríos & Robin Myers, Four by Four��by Sara Mesa & Katie Whittemore, and The Book of Anna��by Carmen Boullosa & Samantha Schnee.

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We started this season off with . Here’s the jacket copy:

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of characters—the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student—whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic,��Ríos��offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile’s La Zona Central, the stories in��Cars on Fire��offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces—xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world—that shape life in Chile and the United States.

And here are links to each Cars on Fire episode:

Episode 1: Pages 1-63 (, , )

Episode 2: Pages 64-151 (, , )

Episode 3: Pages 152-End (, , )

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Then we moved on to��. Here’s the jacket copy:

Set entirely at Wybrany College—a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities—Four by Four��is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany’s “program” is always palpable, but never explicit. The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the “special,” scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.

In the second part—a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an imposter who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher—the eerie sense of what’s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister.

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.

And here are links to each Four by Four episode:

Episode 4: Pages 1-86 (, , )

Episode 5: Pages 87-156 (, , )

Episode 6: Pages 156-222 (, , )

Episode 7: Pages 223-End (, , )

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And we wrapped things up with��. Here’s the jacket copy:

IN THIS CONTINUATION OF ANNA KARENINA’S LEGACY, RUSSIA SIMMERS ON THE BRINK OF CHANGE AND THE STORIES THAT HAVE LONG BEEN KEPT SECRET FINALLY COME TO LIGHT.

Saint Petersburg, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the vivid portrait that the tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts Anna wrote just before her death, which open a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairy tale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapon, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, plan protests that embroil the downstairs members of the Karenin household in their plots and tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa tells a polyphonic and subversive tale of the Russian revolution through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

Episode 8: Pages 1-73 (, , )

Episode 9: Pages 74-98 (, , )

Episode 10: Pages 99-126 (, , )

Episode 11: Pages 127-161 (, , )

Episode 12: Pages 162-End (, , )

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Enjoy!

And while you’re here, you should get a copy of�� and be ready for Season Twenty of TMR starting on September 6th!

Today’s #WITMonth post is an except from

Here’s the jacket copy:

Subtly in the vein of��Dogville��or Coetzee’s��Disgrace, and invoking the works of Agota Kristof,��Un Amor��probes ideas of language, alienation, and community through the eyes of a woman who, when brought into conflict, finds herself on the potential brink of deeper awareness of herself and her place in the world.

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in La Escapa, an arid rural village in Spain’s interior. She settles into a small, shabby house with cheap rent to begin work on her first literary translation, with a skittish and ill-tempered dog—a gift from the boorish landlord—her only company.

Burdened with assumptions about country life, Nat will enter into relationships with the handful of local inhabitants—her negligent landlord, Píter the hippie, the dementia-afflicted Roberta, the young city family who comes on weekends, the unsociable man they call “The German”—from whom she appears to receive a customary welcome.

Mutual misunderstanding and a persistent sense of alienation, however, thrum below the surface. And when conflicts arise over repairs to the house, Nat receives an offer and makes a crucial decision.

In prose as taut and oppressive as the atmosphere in La Escapa,��Un Amor��extends Mesa’s exploration of language and power, confronting readers with the limits of their own morality as tensions mount and the community’s most unexpected impulses emerge.

This book—like so many of Mesa’s—is a slow burn, with tension increasing with every event, every turn of the page. The except below is from the first section of the book, setting the scene, introducing a few key characters, and creating the atmosphere of this part of rural Spain. Enjoy!

Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

She’d be hard pressed to come up with a convincing answer if asked to explain what she was doing there. That’s why she hedges when the time comes, babbling about a change of scenery.

“People must think you’re crazy, right?”

The cashier smacks gum as she piles Nat’s shopping on the counter. It’s the only store in a few-mile radius, an unmarked establishment where foodstuffs and hygiene products accumulate in a jumble. Shopping there is expensive and the pickings are slim, but Nat is reluctant to take the car to Petacas. She rummages in her wallet and counts out the bills she needs.

The girl from the shop is in a chatty mood. Brazen, she asks Nat all about her life, flustering her. The girl wishes she could do what Nat’s done, but the opposite, she says. Move to Cárdenas, where stuff actually happens.

“Living here sucks. There aren’t even any guys!”

She tells Nat that she used to go to high school in Petacas, but she dropped out. She doesn’t like studying, she’s crap at every subject. Now she helps out in the shop. Her mom gets chronic migraines, and her dad also does some farming, so she lends a hand at the store. But as soon as she turns eighteen, she’s out of there. She could be a cashier in Cárdenas, or a nanny. She’s good with kids. The few kids who ever make it to La Escapa, she smiles.

“This place sucks,” she repeats.

It’s the girl who tells Nat about the people living in the surrounding houses and farms. She tells her about the gypsy family squatting in a dilapidated farmhouse, right near the ramp for the highway. A bus picks up the kids every morning; they’re the only kids who live in La Escapa year-round. And there’s the old couple in the yellow house. The woman is some kind of witch, the girl claims. She can predict the future and read your mind.

“She’s a little crazy, so it’s creepy,” the girl laughs.

She tells Nat about the hippie in the wooden house, and the guy they call “The German” even though he isn’t from Germany, and Gordo’s bar—though to call the storehouse where they serve up bottles of beer a bar is, she admits, a bit of an exaggeration. There are other people who come and go according to the rhythms of the countryside, dayworkers hired for two-week stints or just the day, but also whole families who have inherited houses they can’t manage to sell and who live somewhere else half the year. But you never see women on their own. Not women Nat’s age, she specifies.

“Old ladies don’t count.”

During the first days, Nat gets confused and mixes up all that information, partly because she’d listened absently, partly because she’s in unfamiliar territory. La Escapa’s borders are blurry, and even though there is a relatively compact cluster of small houses—where hers is located—other buildings are scattered farther off, some inhabited and others not. From the outside, Nat can’t tell whether they’re homes or barns, if there are people inside or just livestock. She loses her bearings on the dirt roads and if it weren’t for the shop—which sometimes feels more familiar to her than the house she’s rented and slept in for a week—as a point of reference, she’d feel lost. The area isn’t even very pretty, although at sunset, when the edges soften and the light turns golden, she finds a kind of beauty she can cling to.

Nat takes her grocery bags and says goodbye to the girl. But before she exits the shop, she turns back and asks about the landlord. Does the girl know him? The girl purses her lips, shakes her head slowly. No, not really, she says. He’s lived in Petacas for a long time.

“But I do remember seeing him around here when I was little. He always had a pack of dogs and a really bad temper. Then he got married, or got together with someone, and left. I guess his wife didn’t want to live in La Escapa—can’t blame her. This place is worse for girls. Even though Petacas is nothing special—I wouldn’t want to live there either, no way.”

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Sara Mesa

She tries to play with the dog, tossing him an old ball she found in the woodpile. But instead of catching it and bringing it back, the dog limps away. When she crouches down next to him, putting herself on his level so he won’t be afraid, he skulks off with his tail between his legs. The dog is a piece of work, she thinks, a real rotter. Sieso, they’d call him in the part of Spain she comes from. It seems a good a name as any—after all, she has to call him something. It certainly describes his surly nature. But Sieso is as inscrutable as he is unsociable. He hangs around, but it’s like he wasn’t there at all. Why should she have to settle for a dog like that? Even the little dog in the shop, an extremely anxious Chihuahua mix, is much nicer. All the dogs she meets on the roads—and there are tons of them—run over when she calls. A lot of them are looking to be fed, of course, but also to be pet; they are nosy and curious, wanting to know who this new girl in the neighborhood is. Sieso doesn’t even seem interested in eating. If she feeds him, great, and if not, that’s fine too. The landlord wasn’t kidding: the animal’s upkeep is cheap. Sometimes Nat is ashamed of the aversion she feels toward the animal. She asked for a dog and here he is. Now she cannot—must not—say—or even think—that she doesn’t want him.

One morning at the shop, she meets the hippie, as the girl called him. Now she languidly waits on them both, smoking a cigarette with no sense of urgency. The hippie is a little older than Nat, though he can’t be more than forty. Tall and strong, his skin is weathered by the sun, his hands broad and cracked, his eyes hard but placid. He wears his hair long in a terrible cut and his beard is on the reddish side. Why the girl calls him “hippie” is something Nat can only guess. Maybe it’s his long hair or because he is someone who, like Nat, comes from the city, a stranger, something incomprehensible for anyone who has lived in La Escapa since childhood and can only think of getting away. The truth is, the hippie has lived there a long time. He is, therefore, nothing novel, not like Nat. She observes him from the corner of her eye, his efficient movements, concise and confident. As she waits her turn, she pats the back of the dog he has brought with him. She’s a chocolate Labrador, old but undeniably elegant. The dog wags her tail and noses Nat’s crotch. The three of them laugh.

“What a good girl,” Nat says.

The hippie nods and holds out his hand. Then he changes his mind, withdraws it and moves in to kiss her. Just one kiss on the cheek, which causes Nat to remain with her face tilted, waiting for the second kiss that doesn’t come. He tells her his name: Píter. With an i, he specifies: P-í-t-e-r. At least that’s how he likes to spell it, except when he’s forced to write it officially. The less one writes one’s real name, the better, he jokes. It’s only good for signing checks at the bank, for those thieves.

“Natalia,” she introduces herself.

Then comes the obligatory question: what is she doing in La Escapa? He’s seen her out on the trails and also saw her tidying up the area around the house. Is she going to live there? Alone? Nat feels awkward. She would prefer that nobody watch her while she works, especially without her knowledge, which is inevitable because the boundaries of the property are marked only by fine wire mesh, denuded of vegetation. She tells him she’s only staying a couple of months.

“I’ve seen the dog, too. You got him here, right?”

“How do you know?”

Píter confesses that he knows the animal. One of the landlord’s many. That dog, in fact, is probably the worst of the lot. Her landlord will pick them up wherever, doesn’t train them, doesn’t vaccinate them, doesn’t care for them in the slightest. He uses, then abandons, them. Did she ask for the dog? She can be sure the landlord has given her the most useless one he had.

Nat considers this and the man suggests she give the dog back. There’s no reason to settle if he isn’t what she wanted. The landlord isn’t a good guy, he says, she’s better off keeping her distance. He doesn’t like to speak badly of anyone, he insists, but the landlord is another matter. Always thinking about how to scam people.

“I can get you a dog if you want.”

The conversation leaves Nat uneasy. Sitting on her doorstep with a lukewarm bottle of beer—the fridge, too, is on the fritz—she watches Sieso sleeping beside the fence, stretched out in the sunshine. The flies loiter on his slightly swollen belly, where the marks of old wounds are visible.

The thought of returning him is deeply unsettling.

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Katie Whittemore

She is surprised by the activity in Petacas. It takes her a while to find parking; the layout of the roads is so chaotic and the signage so contradictory that once you enter the town, an unexpected detour can easily take you right out of it again. The houses are modest, their façades worse for the wear and mostly plain, but there are brick buildings, too, up to six stories tall, distributed arbitrarily here and there. The businesses are clustered around the main square; the town hall—an ostentatious building with large eaves and stained-glass windows—is surrounded by small bars and Chinese-owned bazaars. Nat buys a small fan at one of them. Then she wanders in search of a hardware store, reluctant to ask for directions. She is struck by the neglected appearance of the women, who have left the house with unkempt hair and slip-on sandals. Many of the men—even the old ones—are in sleeveless shirts. The few children she sees are unsupervised, licking popsicles, scampering, rolling on the ground. The people—men, women, kids—all of whom are loud and sloppy, look strangely alike. Inbreeding, Nat thinks. Her landlord is a perfect fit.

She worries about running into him, but it’s Píter, not the landlord, whom she meets in the hardware store. She is happy to see him: someone she knows, someone friendly, someone smiling at her at last, coming over, what are you doing here, he asks. Nat shows him the box with the fan and he scowls. Why didn’t she ask the landlord? It’s his responsibility to keep the property in habitable condition. Not air conditioning, obviously, but a fan at least.

“Or you could have asked me. That’s what neighbors are for.”

Nat looks for an excuse. She’s happy to buy one, she says. She’ll take it with her when she leaves La Escape. Píter looks at her askance, pretending not to believe her.

“And what are you buying here? Tools to fix everything he left broken?”

Nat shakes her head.

“No. Stuff for the garden.”

“You’re planting a garden?”

“Well, just something basic . . . Peppers and eggplants, they’re easy, I guess. I want to try, at least.”

Píter takes her by the arm, steps closer.

“Don’t buy anything,” he whispers.

He tells her that he can lend her all the tools she needs. He says, too, that she might as well forget about a garden. Nothing’s grown on her land in years; the soil is totally depleted; it would take days and days of hard work to get it into shape. If she insists—Nat hangs on that word, insists—he could lend her a hand, but he absolutely advises against it. Although he speaks smoothly, Píter’s voice contains indisputable sureness, an expert’s confidence. Nat nods, waits for him to finish his shopping. Cables, adaptors, screws, a pair of pliers: all very professional, very specific, nothing at all like the indefiniteness in which she operates.

Outside, Píter walks beside her at an athletic pace, straight but flexible. His way of moving is so elegant, so different from the people around them, that Nat is proud to be walking next to him, the sort of pride associated with feeling legitimate. The spell breaks when he points to the windows at the town hall.

“Pretty, aren’t they? I made them.”

Nat thinks the windows clash terribly with the building’s exposed brick, but she is all praise: they suit it perfectly, she says. Píter looks at her appreciatively. Precisely, he says, that’s what he seeks, for his work to befit its context.

“Petacas isn’t the nicest place in the world, but—to the extent possible—one should strive to beautify one’s surroundings, don’t you think?”

“So, you’re a . . .” Nat doesn’t know what you call a person who makes stained-glass windows.

“A glazier? Yes. Well, more than a glazier. A glass and color artisan, you might say. Like, I don’t just cover windows.”

“Of course.” Nat smiles.

They have a beer in one of the bars on the square. The beer is ice-cold and goes down easy. Píter observes her closely—too closely, she thinks—but his eyes are sweet and that softens her discomfort. The conversation returns to the landlord—that cheeky bastard, he repeats—the tools and her barren plot. He insists on lending her what she needs. Just a matter of tidying the yard, clearing space for a table and some lawn chairs, then planting a few oleander and yucca, or some succulents suitable for the harsh climate. There’s a huge nursery near Petacas, very cheap. If she wants, one day they can go together. It seems her plans for a vegetable garden have been scrapped. She doesn’t mention them again.

Again Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

It’s amazing how much questionable music there is that includes a reference to a “4×4.” This week’s is a little ditty by Hardy that includes this lyric, “Them good old boys been feeling macho / In that quatro wheel drive.” Hell yeah!

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . The next broadcast will be on . We’ll be talking about the final section of Four by Four, which is available in everywhere. (And as an audiobook via !)

After next week’s episode, we’ll move on to����by Carmen Boullosa and Samantha Schnee. !

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And you can get 20% off by using the code 2MONTH at checkout. (Offer only good in the U.S., since we can’t ship overseas, but to be honest, we can’t ship right now! Order it from .)

You can also support this podcast and��all��of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

This week’s music is a little gem from Miley Cyrus called “4×4.”

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . The next broadcast will be on . We’ll be talking about pages 87-156 of Four by Four, which is available in everywhere. (And as an audiobook via !)

Derek Maine will be the special guest next week, and produced this��. Check it out!

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And you can get 20% off by using the code 2MONTH at checkout. (Offer only good in the U.S., since we can’t ship overseas, but to be honest, we can’t ship right now! Order it from .)

You can also support this podcast and��all��of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

—William Poundstone,

It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list author writing in English. There are additional costs—not just in terms of paying the translator, which is baked into the idea of publishing books from around the world and shouldn’t be something publishers complain about—such as increased expenses to tour an author, the mental stress of having to work approximately ten times as hard to get the same level of attention given to books written by Americans, the fact that most translation-centric presses are non-profits, which means that in addition to all the normal publishing tasks, you also have to spend a significant amount of time filling out grant applications and final reports, running fundraising campaigns, cultivating major donors, and working with a board of directors.

Richard Nash used to say that all indie press publishing is two fuck-ups away from collapse. Presses specializing in international lit? We might only be one fuck-up away. Or one COVID-19.

Just because I have the tendency to ramble, I’m going to drop the lede right here, then circle back: Open Letter needs your support more than ever before. Everyone’s struggling, there are hundreds of worthy causes and orgs to donate to, but if you like our books, our free content, our role in the translation-ecosystem, please consider to us. I don’t want to sound alarmist—or at least not more than is warranted—but we need a lot of things to break our way to continue operating like we have for the past thirteen years.

Last post, I shared a graph of how our sales fell off the ledge in April, seriously jeopardizing our chances of having our best year ever. (Which we were on pace for through March!) But, in a way, that chart is misleading. The numbers are all accurate, it’s just that this chart is basically everyone’s chart. (Unless you work in the booze industry! According to an ad on Instagram, liquor sales go up 243% during quarantine. Which, well, um, that data has��to be a sample size of one, so . . .)

The long-term consequences of lockdown, of having 20% unemployment, of dealing with uncertainty and fear of a future outbreak will be screwing things up for the foreseeable future, no matter how much Trump and protestors want to wish that away.

Which brings me to my actual point: Open Letter isn’t just suffering because it’s hard to sell a lot of books right now, but because more than a third of our revenue comes from the University of Rochester. The education crisis is so pervasive and terrifying—and impossible to address as a whole—but thanks to sending students home, refunding room & board fees, having worries about fall enrollment, and employing large numbers of people whose jobs don’t��directly��generate revenue, higher ed is in some massive trouble.

I don’t have/won’t share the specifics about the University of Rochester, but I was forced to furlough Kaija for two months and Anthony for three weeks, and every division on campus is taking a hit to their budget. It doesn’t help that the UR Medical Center is and is furloughing 20% of its staff.

All of this is to say that things might be evolving at Open Letter over the next months and years. In the current environment, the model we’ve been operating under doesn’t seem sustainable. What will this mean? Nothing drastic right now, but we’re going to have to reassess how we allocate our resources. Which may include having to cut back on the altruistic things we do for the larger community (from posts about other press’s books, to podcasts, to running weekly translation workshops, to speaking with whomever asks for advice), since these are all unfunded.

Again, if Open Letter is at all a meaningful part of your literary life, I hope you’ll consider to us. The U of R’s donation site is a bit clunky, since you have to “select a designation” choose “other-write in” and then write in “Open Letter,” but it can be done. Or you could mail us a check directly if that’s easier. For worse, these appeals from us are going to become much more commonplace—even after “all this.”

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OK, now that that’s out of the way—sorry, but if you knew the level of anxiety and uncertainty I’m dealing with in regard to the press you would know just how restrained those above paragraphs really are—let’s get to the fun stuff!

So, this week’s post is actually three posts, a triptych of posts. (If you’ll forgive a bit of pretentiousness.) There are linkages between the three, and I’m actually experimenting with writing all three simultaneously, but, to be honest, they’re each pretty separate from one another.

I want to start this one by recommending����by Mónica Ramón Ríos, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers. This was our April publication, officially releasing on April 14th, which isn’t great for a book that was positioned to take off thanks to bookseller love and recommendations . . . Just check out this quote from a *starred review* in��: “Ríos’s themes are unwaveringly contemporary—LGBTQ and feminist issues; immigrant life; politics—but it is artistry, not dogma, that guides her prose. This is art house literature at its best: provocative, alluring, and uncompromising.”

These stories are��fierce. As mentioned above, they’re uncompromising in both their stylistic approach and political aims. They’re fun, yet unnerving. They’re playful in form, without fear of experimenting. (“Invocation” is told in two voices running in parallel down the pages.) They are, in short, fire.

This is going to be the next Two Month Review book (official schedule to come, but we’ll be talking about it live on June 3, 10, and 17, and both Mónica and Robin will be honored guests), so I’d highly recommend ordering it so that you’ll have it in time.

To celebrate the release of��COF, the��Southwest Review��ran this incredible conversation between Ríos and Myers, which I wholeheartedly recommend . But here are a few fantastic bits:

Robin Myers: I’d like to ask you instead: how did the collection come to be structured for you? And in what ways did you feel, as you wrote the stories, that they were speaking to each other? As I translated, I sometimes imagined them as a kind of song series: one completely different musical experience after another, jarring and thrilling in their contrasts, their color-scapes. But sometimes I thought of them more as a chorus: all speaking up at the same time, all claiming their place in a kind of riotous multiplicity. I’d love to have you discuss the relationships among the stories as they revealed themselves to you.

Mónica Ramón Ríos: The urge to write these stories emerged, among other things, from a localized, experiential, desire-based knowledge/belief that the self is a perilous fiction that has been imposed on us both by very good literature and by very poor books. And I say this not because I read all the poststructuralists (which I did) or the postmodernists (which I ditched), but because I rebel against the idea of fixity, of borders, walls, names, or any supplementary tools to define being, voice, or even our work as anything more than fiction­­. I learned to write at a time when Chile was plagued by very bad neoliberal realism, which coincided with the most treacherous moments of Chilean politics: when the left sold the country and settled with the dictatorial right to create a new transactional structure of power—this is the order we are trying so hard to remove right now in Chile. In terms of literature, the transparency and immediacy of neoliberal realism was not only trying to oppose the literature of the ’80s (a dense oppositional, feminist, queering, literature of protest against univocal dictatorial violence, but also of military stupidity, embodied by the Ministry of Censorship). At the same time, in fact, neoliberal realism was trying to hide those power transactions. And it meant wanting to write like the��gringo��literature exported to Chile��because the whole country wanted to enjoy their fucking McDonald’s. What came out of that was not literature, but a new writer who was a vendor, a new literature that was a product. It wasn’t even entertaining, because it made you lethargic, like the joints mixed with glue we’d buy on the cheap as teenagers to pass days that felt eternal and useless. This was a literature without consequences. But even back then, we still craved those moments of intense understanding that made us become��trabajadores de la letra,��writer-workers.

So, yes, the voice of��Cars on Fire��is a riot. I wrote all of the short stories, except one, after moving to the United States. And in many ways their voice also riots against the inherent racism in this country, especially the one concealed behind niceness. I aim my pen at those people who abuse us saying they are helping us, saying they are our friends.

RM: It seems to me that two of the central forces at work in the book are, on the one hand, the human thirst for revenge (explored especially in part one, “Obituary”), and, on the other, the exhilarating multiplicity of love and desire (which particularly characterizes part two, “Invocation”). Part of what fascinates me about the book is how your ventures into the intentionally exaggerated or even the fantastical—I’m thinking of the comical distortedness of the academic administrator in “The Head,” the amorphous creature in “Extermination,” or the sinuous human-animal metamorphoses in “Invocation”—affects the dynamic between your characters and their environments, or with each other. Or would you object to my use of the word “fantastical” here? Maybe what I’m really asking is how you see, and like to channel, the slipperiness of place, time, and form in your work.

MRR:��I would rephrase it as Mónica Ramón’s thirst for revenge and their desire for the exhilarating multiplicity of love. I see the stories you’ve mentioned as pure realism. I say this with a mischievous intent to contend the possibilities of the real and to subvert the straitjacket that has constricted our experiences.

Again, read the whole thing .

Also, check out this that’s part of Caroline Alberoni’s “” series;

CA: Besides being a translator you are also a poet. Does being a poet help as translator and vice-versa? If so, how?

RM: It absolutely helps. Both poetry and translation (and by this I mean the translation of anything, not just poetry) are practices rooted in the materiality of language. If you write poetry or translate anything, you are in the business of dealing with words as stuff, as resources, as concrete elements you shape and combine to form certain structures and spark particular effects in the reader. Of course, in translation, you’re using language in response to—in relation to—language that already exists in the world. You’re writing (because translating is also writing) in the service of and in complicity with that language. In this sense, too, translation demands both that you saturate yourself with the original text and that you distance yourself from it. That doubleness has helped me write my own poetry, I think, at least in the sense that it’s made the experience of writing poetry much more interesting. For one thing, it’s made me more conscious of the artifice of whatever I’m doing (and I mean “artifice” not as an insult but as a fact). For the same reason, it’s also made me feel freer to experiment: to think with more curiosity and more gratitude about language as “tools” and how I might try them out. I do feel that writing poetry affects my translations as well, or my approach to translating. For example, I care a great deal about sound when I write poetry, about what happens to words when we string them together and speak them aloud, and I feel a similar need to “hear” what language does in translating both poetry and prose. That said, I don’t mean to talk about this obsession with sound as if it were strictly the domain of poetry, much less of poets, because that’s not the case at all! I’m just musing about what it��feels��like for me in going about things as I go about them.

Also, you can purchase Robin’s most recent poetry collection, , in a beautiful bilingual edition from Antílope Press in Mexico.

Final thing! On Wednesday, May 13th at 7pm eastern, you can see Mónica Ramón Ríos in conversation with Carmen Boullosa via .

*

Sticking with the idea of these biweekly posts being some sort of quarantine reading diary, I have to take a paragraph to praise Zulfikar Ghose’s . This isn’t coming out until September, but it’s a truly beautiful book. I mostly know of Ghose from the issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction that featured him (together with Milan Kundera), but his life and career are fascinating.

Born in Pakistan, he lived in London in the 1950s and 60s, then moved to Texas in 1969. He’s written a dozen novels,��and an equal number of poetry collections and works on nonfiction. He even co-authored a book of short stories with personal favorite B. S. Johnson. ( sounds particularly interesting to me. Especially in combination with Patrik Ouředník’s (trans. Alex Zucker), which is near the top of my to-read pile.) He’s been praised by T. S. Eliot!

For whatever reason, the books that have worked best for me in quarantine have been British. Or at least set in London. Escapism + mid-50s British charm works for me. Which is why I plowed through��Kensington Quartet��in just a couple days.

It’s a tricky book, a book of memories and nostalgia in which the narrator is wandering around London, remembering earlier versions of himself as if they still physically exist. It’s a short novel of memory and landscape, an ode to London that will appeal to lovers of Esther Kinsky or other meditative, geography of memory type, flaneur writers.

It also opens in Kensington Gardens following almost the��exact same path��I walked when I was there on March 10th, before the world completely fell apart.

I am here now, just inside Kensington Gardens.

To the north the pebbled concrete expanse of the Broad Walk slopes up towards a pale blue sky above Bayswater. Two women with bundled-up toddlers and another pushing a pram, and farther up shadowy figures of three men in charcoal-grey coats, there is a scattering of ghostly bodies on the Broad Walk, the light so unusual, almost too bright, aglow in my mind, a surprisingly illuminated London. Glancing back in the direction of Palace Gate, I observe that you are striding up in that jaunty walk of yours, always so enthusiastically eager for the grass under the elms and a view of the Long Water. There are no shops to distract you, only consulates of foreign lands across the road you have no interest in, one displaying a flag, green and white, of indistinguishable nationality, hanging too limply. Your step always quickens in Palace Gate when the distant green blur of Kensington Gardens first catches your eye and even when the day is overcast and grey you see a sudden green shiver in the sky, for you it’s the pulse of London, throbbing, as if it were your blood that surged with a sudden passion and made your breath come hard and loud—as that first time, that April, which then became the loveliest of months, when the first of English green you saw was here—all those prints of Constable’s landscapes in the Blackie readers coming alive in the grass at your feet—and your blood bounded in amazement. Another three minutes and you will be coming into the Gardens, inflating your chest when you enter, as is your habit, taking a deep breath and holding it a long moment as when the doctor, his stethoscope’s cold disc on your chest, says, Breathe in and hold, listening to your heart.

Ghose’s writing is simply delicious. The more grounded moments—of the narrator’s first experiences in school, when he nearly has a fling with a gay friend of his teacher’s, when things don’t work out with his various girlfriends—are conventionally compelling and well-crafted, but it’s in the long descriptions, the meanderings, the way that he constructs a palpable sense of London that the prose excels. In a way, this book is a throwback. The narrator’s life resembles Ghose’s in some superficial ways, but it doesn’t feel like the “I” fiction so predominant these days. It’s an attempt to create something beautiful and heartfelt, an archeology of emotional memories tied to a very specific place.

*

Last bit of self-promotional stuff . . .

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve participated in two virtual events to support ��by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore.��Since neither space nor time really make sense anymore, I thought I’d share both of them here.

First up was the Wordplay event with both Sara and Katie. This one is bilingual in a fun way, mostly about the book and Sara, and features one of the funniest event moments I’ve seen, when Katie flees her daughter and her daughter’s “Let it Go”-playing birthday card.

powered by Crowdcast

Designed to be a complement to that event, the one Katie and I did for the Transnational Series at Brookline Booksmith is all about translation, crafting voice, interesting challenges Katie had to deal with, and a fun “mercenaries vs. soldiers” bit.

powered by Crowdcast

I hope you enjoy both, and please buy a copy of the book from one of the two organizations that hosted us!

Following the [Chernobyl] accident, physicists calculated that there was a ten percent risk that a nuclear explosion on an unimaginable scale would take pace within a fortnight. Such an explosion [. . .] would have been equivalent to forty Hiroshima bombs going off at the same time, and would have rendered Europe uninhabitable.

—Andrés Neuman,��Fracture

Is this thing on?

Even though I posted something a mere eleven days ago (good god, time has no functionality anymore), and have been doing podcasts almost constantly, I feel like I’m coming out of retirement, or am back from some season-ending injury, or something.

There’s no reason to dwell on the ways in which COVID-19 + the mental and physical burdens of lockdown (is it possible for the world to run out of booze?) + full-time parenting (quarantine is the new social birth control) has made a mess of daily life. We’re all struggling, we all have our good days and dark moments, we’re all filled with uncertainty and fears about the future, and I’m willing to bet that concentrating on��anything��is kind of hit or miss right now.

I alluded to this in “The Book That Never Was” post, but in another timeline, I’m transcribing the final interview for my proposed book on translation and getting ready to go on tour with Sara Mesa and Katie Whittemore to celebrate the release of Four by Four.

In��another��alternate timeline, I came back from Europe to quarantine, kept my shit mostly together, and wrote a novel or a book that’s half-play, half-novel (I might dump my plot idea somewhere in this post), or worked on a lot of content for Three Percent, or wrote more newsletters than any reader could ever want.

But then again, as mentioned in the quote above, in��one of the worst timelines, Chernobyl blows Europe all to hell in 1986 and the world of 2020 is unrecognizable—unrecognizable in a way that’s different than it currently is.

Remember when the biggest news story of the year was Kobe’s passing?

For me, on March 15th, everything I used to do with ease—read, write, make terrible jokes, get angry about petty shit in righteous ways—became nearly impossible. Over the past six weeks, the sense of trauma (or world sick) that completely crippled me is��occasionally manageable. Like today.

That said, all my favorite bits for how to write these posts feel pretty stupid.

How the Sausage Is Made: In the past, I would figure out some book(s) I wanted to write about, then construct some sort of framing bit that would twist the way we usually talk about books. I can’t write straight reviews anymore (could I ever?), and journalism is boring. I hope some of those posts (like the one about treating authors like soccer players and totally upending the author-agent-publisher relationship in favor of the small, yet mighty) were entertaining. Maybe one or two had something interesting to say about book culture. They all feel like dispatches from another world right now, and to goof on shit when the world is shut down, when the continued existence of indie bookstores and publishers feels like a possibility��instead of something to count on, and when there’s a strong possibility we will all lose someone close to us because of this virus . . . well, that just doesn’t feel quite right.

Then again, I’m sure someone out there is working on a book about “Marketing in the Age of the Coronavirus,” looking to exploit our current situation for the benefit of the wealthy. Oh dear god, !��

SHOULD we even be marketing right now?

Firstly, yes. You should absolutely be continuing your marketing right now. The financial and economical impact that loss of revenue or businesses shutting down could have, may linger far beyond the actual health crisis. So you need to ensure that consumers who CAN continue to buy do, and that those who don’t still build a relationship with your brand through this time.

Well, books are listed on there as a valuable product to market, since they’re “entertaining” (I have questions), maybe I should just go ahead and riff and recommend for a while. We’re covering��The Dreamed Part every week with the , and being coronhonest about the book ecosystem on the , so why not talk about a broader set of books here on the website?

Also, buckle up, I feel like I have all the time in the world now, so this is most definitely going to run long . . . and, like with the “January Reading Diary,” this is going to include all sorts of media. I mean, that’s all we have left, right?

*

Let’s start with the actual reason I forced myself to try and write this post tonight: Andrés Neuman’s��, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and coming out on May 5th from FSG.

This was the first thing I tried to read when I got home on March 15th. The world was breaking and shutting down at an incredible pace, and I figured a book about a different catastrophe—the earthquake and ensuing tsunami that led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster—would take my mind off of panic buying and my assumption that I probably had the virus and/or would get it and die alone.

As you might remember, this trifecta of destruction took place on March 11th, 2011. Jeremy Garber pointed this out to me, but do you know what else has happened on March 11th? The Madrid bombings. And the WHO declaring COVID-19 a pandemic. What a cursed date! Fuck 3/11.

(And is it weird to anyone else that this is exactly��six months before another cursed date? One of violent coups, terrorist attacks, and Russia’s test of the most powerful non-nuclear bomb of all time. Coincidence? Or just the result of living in a simulation?)

Back to the book. On March 11th, Yoshi Watanabe is out on the streets when the earthquake hits.

The city’s obsession, its nervous system, is prevention. Containment. Isolation. Ditches. Firebreaks. Anti-seismic constructions. An entire urban plan based on future disasters. The result is a dense weight of trust on a surface of fear. With this in mind, Watanabe stops off at a supermarket. He enters with a very specific objective.

When he locates the toilet paper shelf, he discovers there isn’t any. He notices that the people gathering the last rolls are more or less his age. On his way out, he sees that the stocks of a second product have been exhausted. Diapers. Senescence and infancy are united by the bathroom.

The ways in which different cultures and countries process catastrophe is kind of the point of the book, and the fact that this was paralleling our situation right from the jump led me to set the book aside for a few weeks. It wasn’t the right time—too much stress.

(Digression: My bidet obsession might have seemed a bit creepy in the past, but it sure doesn’t anymore! My butt has the last laugh!!)

Over the course of��Fracture, through chapters told by the four major loves of his life along with his own reflections on his current moment, we come to find out that Watanabe was in Hiroshima when the Little Boy was dropped. He loses his father before his eyes, and the rest of his Nagasaki-based family one day later.

This is a book about trauma, about the danger of nuclear energy and weapons, of cultural responses to guilt and suffering, and about human life. All the bigger ideas in here are well thought through—this feels like a massive step forward for Neuman in terms of scope and self-assurance, which is saying a lot after��Traveler of the Century, Talking to Ourselves, and��The Things We Don’t Do—but it’s the sections from the various women that contain so many incredible lines and insights.

The way Neuman writes about failed relationships, about beauty at different ages, about sex and longing and mystery, about webcams and how a mother’s fears tend to be “preemptive,” is so heartfelt and human. This is the first book I’ve read in COVID WORLD that really connected with me. The first one that I��read��and didn’t just intake words.

I could quote probably fifty paragraphs from this book, but I’ll stick with just a few (each from a different one of Watanabe’s loves) that I personally found wise and perceptive:

You spend years creating rituals with someone, and then one day you realize that you don’t like that person anymore. You’re just in love with the ritual. And yet you feel incapable of separating, so you spend the rest of your life cultivating the perfect ritual with the wrong person. [. . .]

Ultimately, translation requires an element of attraction. You desire their voice. You recognize yourself in a stranger. And both are transformed. Doesn’t loving someone also include making their words your own? You struggle to understand, and you misinterpret. The other person’s meaning bumps up against the limits of your experience. For things to work with someone, you have to accept you won’t be able to get them perfectly. That even with the best of intentions, you’re going to manipulate them. [. . .]

As I see it, you fall in love twice. With the same person, that is. Once when you meet them and a second time when you lose them. That happened to me with Enrique. We weren’t getting along so well during those last years, why lie about it? He had his ways, like everyone, but time led me to forget them. After he died, I started to appreciate him again. Not just my husband, but somebody who’d already left long before he did.

All three quotes that are much more mawkish than you probably expected! I love the pyrotechnics that a lot of Spanish-language writers employ in ways that are unequaled in world literature. I’ve made my reputation in publishing a number of them—both at Dalkey Archive and Open Letter. (Speaking of, there’s a bit in Fracture��that I think is an allusion to Fresán’s The Invented Part.��Or a happy coincidence.) I grew up on Cortázar and Borges and love the challenge and brashness of books that challenge ideas of form and structure. Neuman can—and has—done that, but at a time when human connection is so mediated by Zoom and six-feet separations and fear of the infected, his heart really comes through.

*

Interlude #1: It’s ironic that the last post I wrote had a long, involved takedown of . At the time, I was goofing on the way that celebrities—or celebrity authors—could invent their own “bookstores” on Bookshop.org and basically compete with bookstores. At the time, no one gave two fucks about Bookshop.org and it was probably four months from the digital graveyard.

But, oh, how times have changed!

Sort of.

#QuarantineBody

is now being heralded as some great savior for indie bookstores, who��can get up to 30% of all sales placed through the website. (If you choose to attribute your purchase to a specific bookstore; if you just buy from the shop generically, then your favorite indie gets dick.) That sounds great, except it’s a much lower margin than the store gets if they process the order themselves.

So, with all the stores still shipping books—either in stock, or direct-to-home via Ingram—please order from one of them if at all possible.

On a related note, I’ll be putting up more shit in my personal (started as a troll move to show the flaw in the system) and will donate any money I receive from this to . (So far, I’ve made $19.20. WATCH OUT, JAMES PATTERSON!)

Related note to that related note: All proceeds from the sales of our will ALSO go to BINC.

*

Interlude #2: My initial idea for this post was to describe nine different books I’m 100% CERTAIN will come out in 2021 and reference COVID/lockdown and rate them. This came out of reading a sample in which a totally jaded man-boy narcissistically complains about how the world has gone off the rails in 2011. HA! Just wait, buddy. The idea that 2011 was the “worst possible timeline” seems so quaint now. I can’t imagine this book getting published in our current situation.

But that was written years ago, so it can be totally forgiven. (Even if it does have the most purple metaphors I’ve ever encountered.) But someone writing the great Brooklyn relationship novel about a couple falling apart (or coming together) during lockdown? UNFORGIVABLE! Don’t do it. Full stop.

Also: No twee diaries about your personal experiences during lockdown.

I’m dreading the deluge of dystopian YA books about viruses as well. And poorly imagined “alternate histories” about this particular moment in time.

I would be totally into books by moms about having to mother during this period. Because society has always sucked, a lot of the moms I’m in touch with are taking care of the kids full time + homeschooling + trying to do their jobs. I feel like writer-moms have a lot to share about empathy, sanity, will, and humanity. But, as we all know, I’m a sucker for mom books. (Preorder��World’s Best Mother��by Nuria Labari/Katie Whittemore from World Editions as soon as it’s available! I totally stand by this book. It’s great.)

*

Which is maybe a good segue to the��second book I wanted to write about here:��, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore, and which we’re bringing out on May 5th.

All the copies of FOUR BY FOUR that would be in our office, but are instead in my teenage daughter’s LED-lit room, dressed up as a giant armchair.

So, the other day, on one of the never-ending Zoom drinking get togethers that I’m both loving and feeling exhausted by, a bookseller shat on my posts for never promoting our own books. Which, fair. (This was the same day that someone on Twitter trolled me by calling me “a lame” and “total cap” for making fun of in my class. Which, c’mon bro, Bookfinity?!?! That exists to be the butt of so many jokes.)

Although, to be fair, this part of the Open Letter business—meaning Three Percent—was never supposed to be about Open Letter. At least not directly. This is me indulging my impulse to not��market, but to say things about the book world in a broader way. Marketing our books is Anthony’s job! (I kid, I kid. But I do feel embarrassed pimping our own product.)

Nevertheless, I’ll try and include more of our books in here from now on out. I’m 100% sure this won’t change our sales, which, oh my god, this is a chart that will make it crystal clear what trouble the industry is in.

We had planned out two major books for 2020:��Four by Four��for May,��On Time & Water��by Andri Snær Magnason for September. That was one of the pillars to the “How to Take Open Letter to the Next Level” plan.

WELL!

Four by Four‘s tour is over and all of the lovely booksellers who wanted to promote it are either a) unemployed, or b) not capable of hand-selling it in the way they could. And, to add insult to injury, the ABA didn’t choose it for the May IndieNext list. Which, who cares? That particular promotional pamphlet will be in something like 42 Florida and Georgia bookstores. But still: Don’t tell me this process is democratic. Let’s have a little transparency, ABA!

Anyway, this is THE quarantine book, in my opinion. Because I’m almost done with this glass of wine, I’m going to plagiarize what I wrote to all of our subscribers last week, AND reference the forthcoming interview:

I know that we won’t come anywhere near our goal, but since this is Katie’s debut as a translator, I think everyone who reads this post should just buy it. I’m not above asking for favors right now. And if you don’t have a local store to order from, and we’ll give you the ebook for free.

I can’t write about this anymore. It’s a book that’s been in the works for two years, which was—not exaggerating here—the best editing experience of my life, and . . . all of the potential joys of sales and readings and Sara’s first Cubs game have been railroaded. Alas. Such is baseball, such is life!

*

Interlude #3: Speaking of the love of my life—”I’ll never look at my wife the way I look at baseball”—I’ve been filling that void with MLB The Show 2020, which happened to come out as my self-quarantine started. Am I good at it? NO. But I’m passable. And my Cardinals are in first place at 24-20. One-quarter of the season done . . .

One of the things I’ve learned by playing every single game (which I’ve never done before) is that losing streaks suck. You can do everything��almost��perfectly and still lose 3-2 because the homer you��nearly��jacked, went six inches foul. This is a game that is so random. And reminds you that the universe is cruel.

*

Interlude #3: Speaking of baseball, my favorite part of the podcast is the opening banter. I 150% love the way Sam Miller looks at the world (the inspirations for how I think about my own writing are Sam Miller, Drew Magary, and Franco Moretti), and especially the stray thoughts he shares at the beginning of every podcast.

“Shared” might be more appropriate. Without any new stimuli, what is banter?

This is the thing that’s causing me the most psychic anguish: It’s hard to get new stimulation. For something random and unexpected to happen. The craziest shit we’ve ever lived through is all in play, so hearing that Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari are getting divorced just isn’t the same. In normal times, I’d have a bunch of jokes about this. (Mainly related to their appearance on The League in 2013.) Nowadays, that’s too frivolous to even register.

Which is also true of book news. And why I feel weird even attempting this post. Nothing makes sense, nothing matters, so why talk about anything that’s not COVID? On the upside, Rochester decided not to test city employees for smoking weed? They never should have been, but after “staying in place” for two months, I think we all deserve more than that courtesy. I think $1 billion of the��next stimulus package should be sent sending edibles to every adult in the country. I don’t know about all of you, but if a little weed could relieve the stress? Even for an hour? Totally there for that. I feel like my stress baseline is like basically heart attack level. (Did you see that chart above???)

*

Interlude #4: Nicholas Mosley’s series is my intellectual jam right now. I read this��decades��ago. Before I ever met John O’Brien or applied for a fellowship with Dalkey Archive Press. It was one of my top five favorite books—well, if you let me take all five books as a single entry—and it seems more relevant than ever.

I’ll get into this more in future weeks, but here’s a summary of the first book (written, but not the first one you should read) in the series:

, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive—conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations—and try to find a way to realize genuine experience.

I’m so here for a revolution. It doesn’t have to be violent. We have an opportunity to rethink everything. And if we don’t take it? If we let the powerful go back to fucking our lives day in and out after this? That’s on us. Radical change is most possible during a catastrophe. Let’s do this. We can create a new timeline that’s better.

*

I’ve been listening to sooooo much music. Mostly artists like Julia Kent (for relaxation), Dan Deacon (for optimism), and Waxahatchee (for beauty). But, yo, a new Car Seat Headrest album comes out on Friday (a mere 4 COVID years from now) and it’s going to be incredible. I’ve listened to the EP/singles over and over and over and, as someone who likes artists who reinvent themselves with purpose, I’m all in.

That said, in reading the profile of Will Toledo, I found out about his parody EDM band 1 Trait Danger. HOLY SHIT. This is like Tenacious D + MC Lars + Juvenilia.

THIS.

Trolling Pitchfork is always fun. And the bit: “This is supposed to be Vampire Weekend. This is supposed to be Perfume Genius. The good shit!” SO GOOD.

“” is fantastic. And the line, “I’ve only made one mistake in my life, I’ve only made one mistake” from “Can’t Cool Me Down” (ugh, so untimely with the fever metaphor) is killer. God I hope I can hang on for 42 more years and hear this whole album . . .

*

What’s next?

That’s��literally��a note in my “tickler file” of ideas to write about. Right next to “We live in soap opera land continuity.” Jesus Christ, Post.

For me, what’s next is one of fourteen different things. When I first felt like I could read again, I laid out every single book I was interested in across my living room floor and hoped that one would draw me in. That lead to and and and , who were absolutely perfect for my reading mind at that moment.

Now I have two really long books calling out to me: ��by Marguerite Young (been talking about it on TMR forever, and always wanted to finish it), and����by Minae Mizumura, which makes sense as a way of blending Neuman’s Japanese book with Fresán’s bits about Wuthering Heights.��(A True Novel��is based on Emily Brontë’s masterpiece.)

Or I’ll read for work. Or watch��Westworld��and hope that this is all a dream we’ve been living in.

Till the next, stay safe, wash your hands, drink when you need to, and stay sane.

Well, by the middle of September, advanced reader copies of the novel will be shipping to booksellers and reviewers across the country, the cover will have been officially unveiled (I want to include it below, but��Spine��is orchestrating a special cover reveal, because this cover is the bomb), and we’ll be plotting out Sara’s spring tour. And although the book doesn’t come out until May, you can and get 40% off by using WITMONTH at checkout. (Also: Go bug your local independent and tell them to order a STACK of these.)��

You’ll find the catalog copy and excerpt below, but I don’t want to bury the lede: The excerpt below is the result of a rather intensive editing process. We ended up reading almost the entire book aloud, figuring out voices for the various levels of the narration, making sure the subtle humor came through, focusing on various patterns we found in the text, and removing all unnecessary stiffness in the prose. I say “we,” but really, I mean Katie. I encouraged her and brought up specific questions, but this is all her work.��

Although people seem to prefer scandalous stories of bully editors and tone deaf publishers, I wanted to share this here because I think that the editorial process for translations can be extremely rewarding for everyone involved. Editing tends to be invisible—which makes sense and is perfectly just—but since you can read Katie’s first and final drafts, anyone who’s interested in the process can compare and contrast these and get a sense of what we were trying to accomplish.��

Enjoy!

“Sara Mesa. Don’t forget that name. The finalist for the 30th Premio Herralde de Novela. Read it. Share it. Talk about it. Open the book and begin. You won’t be able to put it down.”—Uxue, Un libro al día

Set entirely at Wybrany College—a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities—Four by Four is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany’s “program” is always palpable, but never explicit. The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the “special,” scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.

In the second part—a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an imposter who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher—the eerie sense of what’s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister.

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.

by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore

Part One

Never More Than Two Hundred

CELIA

The contour of the landscape curves, fades, and descends before dissolving in the distance. We are there, at the end, paused and panting under the motionless sky. It’s February and still cold. The air cuts off our breath, attacks Teeny’s lungs. She’s been sick for weeks.

We’ve never made it this far. Our sneakers are soaked from walking in the muddy grass, avoiding the roads.

We wait for Teeny to catch up and then reconvene.

“Should we have breakfast now?” Valen asks.

Her chubby cheeks tremble. Valen is always hungry. The rest of us protest. It’s not time to eat. We only stopped to decide where to go from here, from now. There is no time to waste; we’ll eat later, while we walk. Or we won’t eat at all.

We have two options: climb the hill until we reach the highway or follow the slope down and try to find the river. Though river is probably an exaggeration. Memory summons to mind a brown thread—a creek, at best—but not its exact location. None of them have been through here in years.

“I say we head for the highway. Then we can hitchhike wherever someone will take us.” Marina sounds braver than she acts. We’re not convinced.

I speak up. “Hitchhike? Are you crazy? They would bring us right back.”

“The river is safer,” Cristi says.

“But we don’t know where it is!” says Marina.

Cristi shrugs. Valen tries again, reaching for her backpack. “We could eat while we decide.”

“What do you think, Teeny?” I ask.

She looks up. Squints. The lenses of her glasses are fogged over. She coughs again. She coughs and blinks endlessly. Her nose runs. She’s full of fluid, Teeny is. I don’t even wait for her to respond. I speak for her: “Teeny doesn’t care what we do as long as we do it quick. Sitting around in this cold is going to kill her.”

“I think she should eat something,” Valen says.

“Shut up, you greasy fat ass,” Cristi says.

They fight. First, with insults. Then they throw themselves on the wet ground and roll around, theatrically, half-heartedly. Marina goads them. It’s not clear whose side she’s on. Teeny and I wait. She thinks about nothing and I try to think about everything.

It doesn’t matter. I see them coming in the 4×4, up the narrow, dusty path. They’re coming toward us and there we are, stopped, as stopped as time. I get a rush: anticipating a lecture from the Booty or punishment from the Headmaster makes me feel better.

A quail chirps in the distance. Valen and Cristi get up, brush off their clothes, and look me in the eye. Neither one speaks, but I know they both blame me.

��

IGNACIO

Wybrany College, seven o’clock in the evening. Ten, twelve boys in gym clothes hang around to see what’s happening. Silence has filled the courtyard at the entrance to the school. Night is falling and Héctor enters escorted by his parents, the Head, and the Advisor. He walks past the boys, glancing up and looking at Ignacio. At him, only him. The look is unmistakable, direct.

Ignacio trembles. The crunch of steps on the gravel lingers. He observes the back of Héctor, his head of full, blonde hair, the smooth nape of his neck.

Only when he’s shaken roughly does he realize that they’ve been grumbling in his ear the whole time, and he hasn’t heard a thing.

“I’m talking to you, man, can’t you hear me?

Ignacio nods, craning slightly toward the door through which the New Kid has disappeared.

The mother—the woman he assumes is the mother—is outside, closing her umbrella. She has slender calves and iridescent stockings beaded with drizzle. Lux watches her, too, his head cocked and back arched, ready to flee at the slightest movement.

It’s November 1^st. Ignacio’s birthday: twelve years old and finally the prospect of a friend to protect him.

“I said, what do you think of him?” the other boy insists.

“What do I know? I just saw him.”

“But he looks queer, right?”

“Yeah. Queer.”

Ignacio senses the light is different, more yellow, or hazy. He can’t watch Héctor and listen at the same time, but they keep at him and their insistence becomes a command.

“Why queer?” the other boy presses.

“What do you mean, why? You said it.”

“Yeah, but why? Why did you say it, too? What do you know about that?”

A rueful smile breaks on Ignacio’s face. Caught again, he thinks, but who cares, he’ll finally have a friend to protect him. The New Kid is tall, he’s strong, and out of all the faces there in the courtyard, he chose to look at Ignacio’s.

The girls’ laughter reaches him from the other side of the wall, a restless laughter, musical. He yearns for girls, but only as classmates.

“Because he laughs like a girl.”

“Oh, so you’ve heard him laugh?”

“Yeah, before. When he got here.”

“Really? Where?”

He frees himself from the arm that grabs him.

“I don’t know, before. Let go of me, I have to get to class.”

“Class? Classes are over.”

“Just let me go,” he begs.

“Cripple, sissy, fucking fag,” the other boy says, releasing him.

Ignacio hobbles away in his raised shoe with the lift. Laughter screeches at his back.

Real or imagined, Ignacio hears it all the time.

HECTOR’S ORIGINS

But the New Kid’s origins go back to some time before, to weeks before, days before; not that time matters much in this place, where the days are so like one another. They accumulate, piling up, ��creating a sense of continuity, movement, or the evolution of something.

It’s important to note, perhaps, that Héctor isn’t present on this occasion. Just his mother, or the woman who looks like the mother, and the father—him, for sure—in the Headmaster’s office. They are joined by the assistant headmistress of school, alias the Booty.

The office doesn’t seem like an office. It’s more like a magnificent living room, with its crystal chandeliers and perfectly-worn Persian rugs—so vulgar, if too new—and gleaming floor-to-ceiling windows, the glass spotless and free of flies.

Seated in leather armchairs around a low table, they speak for a long time with the particular stiffness to which they are accustomed.

The Booty—who was very beautiful in another time—discreetly keeps her distance. Only when necessary does she add an opportune fact, blinking before she speaks. In general, such facts relate to fees, services, and requirements, details of which the Headmaster is ignorant, given that he delegates this minutia to her.

The tone of the conversation is sickly-sweet, good manners, slightly soured.

The office smells like cologne. Which cologne? Impossible to say. A mix of various scents: those worn by the people now present, and by those who are absent. The people who sat where they are now, finalizing the details of their progeny’s matriculation.

The scent of the elite, one could say if it weren’t an oversimplification, since that isn’t exactly ��the case. But one couldn’t claim the opposite is true, either.

“You do realize we’re making an exception . . .”

“We know, we know,” Héctor’s father says.

He moves his hands to accentuate his words, like he did when he was a government minister. Unnecessary rhetorical emphasis.

“It will be more expensive—due to the exception, you understand—still, you insist this is what you want?”

“Yes, we insist. It’s absolutely critical.”

“Though it won’t be easy for us, getting rid of the boy,” the woman adds.

“Getting rid of isn’t quite the right expression,” the father says. His eyes flash. He looks at his wife and she goes quiet.

The Booty smiles at them both. They shouldn’t feel uncomfortable, so she says: language betrays us all. Parents undeniably feel a sense of relief when they enroll their children at the college; it happens to everyone. Bringing up a child is complicated, an act of responsibility demanding extreme dedication. There’s nothing wrong with leaving a piece of it in the hands of experts.

“Héctor is a brilliant boy,” the woman continues, speaking cautiously now. “Very intelligent, headstrong, a bit mischievous, maybe. He always finds a way to make his uniform unique somehow: a patch, a hole, a button pinned somewhere. As you know, he needs to do things his way.”

“Ah, but that’s good,” the Headmaster says. “That’s very good. It speaks of character, strength of character, manliness. We don’t go overboard on rules here. Strict on the fundamentals, flexible on incidentals. Our educational methods are liberal, they’re based in absolute freedom. Will you have some . . .” He turns to look at Lux, who has just slipped through the bars on the window, “. . . coffee?”

They drink from little porcelain cups, served with biscuits they barely nibble. Then they settle the rest: the registration, monthly payments, additional installments. The visitors express their surprise that rooms are shared, but nod sensibly at the explanation.

“At this age, boys on their own are hard to control,” says the Booty. “This way they keep an eye on each other. It’s not to their benefit to be alone in their free time.”

“Obviously some boarding schools make private rooms a mainstay of their appeal,” the Headmaster continues, “precisely because they have nothing else to offer. Special menus, the latest technology, professional sports facilities, blah, blah, blah . . . They’re only focused on the superfluous aspects. We guarantee a sufficient level of material comfort. Not excellent, perhaps, but sufficient. But we also guarantee an extraordinarily high-quality education, which goes far beyond academics. We do not impose discipline: the children impose it on themselves. Rigorous, not rigid. Firm, not harsh. Personalities are sculpted, polished until they shine. The country’s best have passed through here. We know how to shape the best.”

He carefully cleans his beard with a napkin and waits for a reaction. The couple smiles. They are notably, visibly relaxed.

An agreement has been reached.