Comemadre by Roque Larraquy, translated by Heather Cleary, has been longlisted for the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translators Association.
Comemadre was previously longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, the Best Translated Book Award, and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by Publishers Weekly.
The shortlist will be announced at the end of September 2019.
Praise for Comemadre
“Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page—a wickedly entertaining ride.”—Publishers Weekly
“Through his callous, narcissistic narrators, Larraquy interrogates the ethics of art and science, and the inhumanity we sanction in the name of intellectual achievement. Slyly funny and viscerally affecting, in a fluid translation by Heather Cleary, Comemadre is the medicine-meets-art horror story of my dreams.”—HuffPost
“Layered without growing dense, the book is crisply comic, scenes punctuated like punchlines. That it all happens within a mere 130 pages is a sort of magic trick—the dizzying kind where a body gets sawed in half.”—The A.V. Club
Roque Larraquy is an Argentinian writer, screenwriter, professor of narrative and audiovisual design, and the author of two books, La comemadre and Informe sobre ectoplasma animal. Comemadre is his first book published in English.
Heather Cleary’s translations include César Rendueles’s Sociophobia, Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets and The Dark, and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions.