This event is ticketed. Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card. Follow the registration link above to purchase a ticket. This event will also be livestreamed for free at this link(opens in a new tab).
Books Are Magic in Brooklyn welcomes Spanish writer Layla Martínez to discuss the English release of her debut novel, Woodworm, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. She will be in conversation with Melissa Lozada-Oliva.
The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. It was built by a smalltime hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.
In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, Layla Martinez’s eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as “a house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge, ” this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.
Layla Martínez (Madrid, 1987) is the author of two nonfiction books in Spanish, Surrogate Pregnancy (Pepitas de calabaza, 2019) and Utopia is not an Island (Episkaia, 2020), as well as stories and articles in numerous anthologies. She has translated essays and novels, writes about music for El Salto, and about television for La Última Hora. Since 2014 she has co-directed the independent publisher Antipersona. Woodworm (Two Lines Press, 2024) is her first novel.
Melissa Lozada-Oliva is the author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria, which was named one of the best books of 2023 by USA Today and Vogue. She cohosts a podcast called Say More. Her collection of short stories Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive will be released Fall 2025. She holds her MFA from NYU and lives in Brooklyn.