Two Lines Press and Cuentero Productions present Soroche, a haunting multimedia performance of Mónica Ojeda’s unflinching short story about a trip to the Andes.
Adapted from the short story by award-winning Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda (Jawbone, Nefando), translated by Sarah Booker and Noelle de la Paz and published in Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories by Two Lines Press, Soroche depicts the effects of a leaked sex tape, filtered through the dizzying lens of altitude sickness. Told in alternating perspectives of Viviana, Karina, Nicole, and Ana—best friends since childhood— “Soroche” recounts the tragic events of a mountain trip intended to help Ana break out of depression following a scandal and the dissolution of an abusive relationship. The chorus of these friends’ confessions reveal contradictions, ruthlessly exposing the flawed friendships and brutal hypocrisies lurking below the surface—all through the haze of Ana’s unraveling.
The cinematic sound design, created by Cuentero Productions to accompany the performance, immerses the audience in the suffocating, malignant air of the mountains while giving voice to Mónica Ojeda’s harrowing observations of abject humiliation and self-loathing. “Mónica Ojeda is such a talented writer of uncomfortable scenarios,” says Two Lines Press editor Sarah Coolidge, “feelings themselves transform into a kind of horror.”
The performance will be followed by a conversation between translators Sarah Booker and Noelle de la Paz and Sarah Coolidge, editor of Through the Night Like a Snake.
Content warning: toxic friendship, body horror, graphic sexual content, self-harm
Co-presented by Litquake.
Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador, 1988) is the author of the novels La desfiguración Silva, Nefando, and Mandíbula, as well as the poetry collections El ciclo de las piedras and Historia de la leche. Her stories have been published in the anthology Emergencias: Doce cuentos iberoamericanos and the collections Caninos and Las voladoras. In 2017, she was included on the Bógota39 list of the best thirty-nine Latin American writers under forty, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award in honor of her outstanding literary achievements.
Sarah Booker’s work has appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Translation Review, and Palabras Errantes, among others. Her translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest was published with the Feminist Press in October 2017.
Noelle de la Paz is a writer and literary translator. Her work appears in The Recluse, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and in the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works) and Boulevard of Ghosts (Local Project). She was a 2021/22 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellow at The Poetry Project and has also received support from Brooklyn Poets and the Queens Council for the Arts.
Sarah Coolidge received her BA in comparative literature from Bard College. She enjoys reading books in Spanish and English, and she writes essays on photography and international literature.