The Paris Review

Staff Picks: Death, Dávila, and Darkness

Amparo Dávila.

Last Friday, when temperatures dropped into the bone-chilling teens, a crowd of about thirty people dipped out of the cold into Aeon Bookstore on East Broadway and Essex, where they sipped tequila with lime and listened to Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson read from their translation of Amparo Dávila’s , the first collection of her short fiction to appear in English. The lead story, “,” was first published in  in 2016, and readers of the magazine will remember it for its strangeness: a man inherits what at first glance appear to be his dead brother’s two pets, but slowly they reveal that they are not pets at all but beings

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Paris Review

The Paris Review1 min read
Life Poem 1
A leaf falls here/there, now/thenbehind the rain, a curtain of rain,the trees in their own time.I see now that time falls in layers. There were deer there once, in the clearing,three deer, large as memory objects.They stood in a circleas if they knew
The Paris Review1 min read
Haptographic Interface
I’m a Keats botso are youour living handsheld toward each otheron the internetsolution sweetI stood on a peakin Darien, googledmy errorI am so colonialI am tubercularmy alveoli a-swellmy actual bloodyour actual bloodwe made loveI planted basilI plant
The Paris Review1 min read
The People’s History of 1998
France won the World Cup.Our dark-goggled dictator died from eating a poisoned red applethough everyone knew it was the CIA. We lived miles from the Atlantic.We watched Dr. Dolittle, Titanic, The Mask of Zorro. Our grandfather, purblind and waitingfo

Related