Chicago – Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror
7:00 pm CT
Pilsen Community Books | 1102 W 18th Street | Chicago, IL
Pilsen Community Books in Chicago welcomes Antonio Diaz Oliva (ADO) and Megan McDowell for a reading from the newest Calico, Through the Night Like a Snake, and a conversation about Latin American horror today with Alejandra Oliva.
A boy explores the abandoned house of a dead fascist…
A leaked sex tape pushes a woman to the brink…
A sex worker discovers a dark secret among the nuns of the pampas…
The mountain fog is not what it seems…
Kermit the Frog dreams of murder…
In ten chilling stories from an ensemble cast of contemporary Latin American writers, including Mariana Enriquez (tr. Megan McDowell), Camila Sosa Villlada (tr. Kit Maude), Claudia Hernández (tr. by Julia Sanches and Johanna Warren), Antonio Diaz Oliva (tr. Lisa Dillman), and Mónica Ojeda (tr. Sarah Booker and Noelle de la Paz), horror infiltrates the unexpected, taboo regions of the present-day psyche. Through the Night Like a Snake showcases short stories from writers who are redefining, reinterpreting, and remixing the horror genre.
ABOUT CALICO
The Calico Series, published biannually by Two Lines Press, captures vanguard works of translated literature in stylish, collectible editions. Each Calico is a vibrant snapshot that explores one aspect of our present moment, offering the voices of previously inaccessible, highly innovative writers from around the world today.
Antonio Diaz Oliva (ADO) has published five books in Spanish, including the novel Campus (Chatos Inhumanos, NYC), a tragicomic and absurdist satire of the power dynamics among Latin American academics at U.S. universities. He received the Roberto Bolaño Young Writers Award and the National Book Award for Best Story Collection in Chile. He lives in Chicago, where he works as an editor at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Rabbits” is part of Gente un poco dañada, a short-story collection that explores the weird and the eerie.
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.
Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer and translator. She is the author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration, which received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. She was the Yale Whitney Humanities Center Franke Visiting Fellow in Spring 2022, and she teaches language justice at NYU.