Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2022
208 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature, this is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.
The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents.
In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others.
National Book Awards, 2022
A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the three time International Booker Prize finalist, "lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon." – O, the Oprah magazine
"Rejoice! Just when we're settling into fall, all cozy on the couch with a Netflix show queued up, a new short story collection from Samanta Schweblin is here to spit in your pumpkin spiced latte and drag its nails down the wall. Seven Empty Houses... takes aim at the place we feel safest: home. Darker and more tinged with terror than her breakthrough novel, Fever Dream, this is Schweblin at her sharpest and most ferocious." – New York Times Book Review
"The proximity to Halloween is appropriate, given Schweblin's idiosyncratic mode of tense and unsettling literary horror. As in Fever Dream and Little Eyes…something is always creeping around these empty houses." – The Millions
"Ethereal… Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation." – Kirkus Reviews
This information about Seven Empty Houses was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Samanta Schweblin is the author of the novel Fever Dream, a finalist for the International Booker Prize, and the novel Little Eyes and story collection A Mouthful of Birds, longlisted for the same prize. Chosen by Granta as one of the twenty-two best writers in Spanish under the age of thirty-five, she has won numerous prestigious awards around the world. Her books have been translated into thirty-five languages, and her work has appeared in English in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. Originally from Buenos Aires, Schweblin lives in Berlin.
Megan McDowell is the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been short- or longlisted four times for the International Booker Prize, and won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2022. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
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