Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana EnríquezMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'm torn on how to rate this book. I did not realize that the subject of the stories would be so graphic and full of horror. Really. I'm talking decapitation, drug addiction, alcohol, anorexia, monsters, things haunted. I should not have requested the book without knowing more.
However, the terrifying writing is obviously well done. I will keep my distance from the writer, Mariana Enríquez, but not her fault. If this is your thing, then you may love this collection. For me personally, I was happy when I reached the last page of each one.
Excerpt of interview by Richard Z. Santos at www.kirkusreviews.com/features/mariana-enriquez/
When I told Mariana Enríquez that I enjoyed Things We Lost in the Fire, her debut short story collection, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“ ‘Enjoy’ is not something most people tell me,” Enríquez says. “They usually say they suffer through them.”
She has a point. The title story details an “epidemic” of women burning themselves in bonfires. Several of the stories are about teenagers, especially women, entering self-destructive spirals that hint at ruin. “The lack of food was good; we had promised each other we’d eat as little as possible. We wanted to be light and pale like dead girls. We don’t want to leave footprints in the snow, we’d say, even though in our city it never snowed.”
“Spiderwebs,” which was recently published in The New Yorker, creates an atmosphere of dread around a married couple’s journey from Buenos Aires through the jungle into Paraguay. But what makes that particular story so haunting isn’t only the menace, the disappearances, and the ghost stories, but the depiction of a boring, terrible marriage.
Continue reading >
When I told Mariana Enríquez that I enjoyed Things We Lost in the Fire, her debut short story collection, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“ ‘Enjoy’ is not something most people tell me,” Enríquez says. “They usually say they suffer through them.”
She has a point. The title story details an “epidemic” of women burning themselves in bonfires. Several of the stories are about teenagers, especially women, entering self-destructive spirals that hint at ruin. “The lack of food was good; we had promised each other we’d eat as little as possible. We wanted to be light and pale like dead girls. We don’t want to leave footprints in the snow, we’d say, even though in our city it never snowed.”
“Spiderwebs,” which was recently published in The New Yorker, creates an atmosphere of dread around a married couple’s journey from Buenos Aires through the jungle into Paraguay. But what makes that particular story so haunting isn’t only the menace, the disappearances, and the ghost stories, but the depiction of a boring, terrible marriage.
Continue reading >
from Goodreads.com www.goodreads.com/author/show/4930107.Mariana_Enr_quez
Born Buenos Aires, Argentina
Genre Horror, Fiction
Influences Stephen King, Arthur Conan Doyle
Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) es una periodista y escritora argentina.
Se recibió de Licenciada en Comunicación Social en la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Se ha desempeñado profesionalmente como periodista y columnista en medios gráficos, como el suplemento Radar del diario Página/12 (donde es sub-editora) y las revistas TXT, La mano, La mujer de mi vida y El Guardián. También participó en radio, como columnista en el programa Gente de a pie, por Radio Nacional.
Trabajó como jurado en concursos literarios y dictó talleres de escritura en la Fundación Tomás Eloy Martínez
Born Buenos Aires, Argentina
Genre Horror, Fiction
Influences Stephen King, Arthur Conan Doyle
Mariana Enriquez (Buenos Aires, 1973) es una periodista y escritora argentina.
Se recibió de Licenciada en Comunicación Social en la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Se ha desempeñado profesionalmente como periodista y columnista en medios gráficos, como el suplemento Radar del diario Página/12 (donde es sub-editora) y las revistas TXT, La mano, La mujer de mi vida y El Guardián. También participó en radio, como columnista en el programa Gente de a pie, por Radio Nacional.
Trabajó como jurado en concursos literarios y dictó talleres de escritura en la Fundación Tomás Eloy Martínez
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