Critics' Opinion:
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Published in USA
Jan 2019
240 pages
Genre: Short Stories/Essays
Publication Information
A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star.
Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection.
Schweblin's stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing, and the line between the real and the strange blur.
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"Starred Review. Schweblin once again deploys a heavy dose of nightmare fuel in this frightening, addictive collection…canny, provocative, and profoundly unsettling." - Publishers Weekly
"Surreal, disturbing, and decidedly original." - Library Journal
"An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author." - Kirkus
"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
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Samanta Schweblin is the author of the novel, Fever Dream, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and her first book translated into English. She was chosen as one of the twenty-two best writers in Spanish under the age of 35 by Granta and is on the Bogotá 39-2017 list. Her stories in Spanish have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and in English have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into twenty languages. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.
Megan McDowell has translated books by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors, and her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among other publications. She lives in Chile.
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