Dark Humor and Sharp Teeth: Translator Megan McDowell on Argentinian sensation Samanta Schweblin
Green Apple Books on the Park | 1231 9th Avenue | San Francisco, CA
Schweblin once again deploys a heavy dose of nightmare fuel in this frightening, addictive collection…canny, provocative, and profoundly unsettling.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin’s darkly humorous tales of people who have slipped through cracks or fallen down holes into alternate realities.
—JM Coetzee
Mouthful of Birds is the award-winning collection by Samanta Schweblin, critically acclaimed author of Fever Dream. Unearthly and unexpected, these stories burrow their way into your psyche with the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark takes on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing and blurring the line between the real and the strange.
With her hallmark style, made popular by Fever Dream – hailed as ‘terrifying and brilliant…dangerously addictive’ by the Guardian – Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection.
Award-winning translator Megan McDowell joins Sarah Rose Etter to talk about translating Latin American women authors, leaving things unsaid, and blurring the line between the real and the strange in her translation of Mouthful of Birds, a collection of spellbinding and eerily unsettling short stories from the Argentinian sensation Samanta Schweblin.
Megan McDowell has translated work by many of the most important contemporary Latin American writers, including Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enriquez, Carlos Fonseca, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN award for Writing in Translation, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize, and shortlisted once for the Kirkus Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.
Sarah Rose Etter is the author of RIPE (Scribner), and The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio), winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction collection, Tongue Party, was selected by Deb Olin Unferth to be published as the winner of the 2011 Caketrain Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, TIME, BOMB, The Cut, VICE, and more.