Mariana Enriquez

An enchanting, highly personal tour of some of the most iconic cemeteries of the world—part travelogue, part memoir, part “excursions through death,” by the author of Our Share of Night and “queen of horror” (Los Angeles Times) “Not a travelogue so much as a grave-a-logue, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is an exuberant, witty wander among the dead. You could not have a better friend to take you by the hand and lead you for a long traipse among tilting tombstones, dank crypts, and chilling history.”—Joe Hill “Enriquez knows cemeteries are the repositories of life’s pain and beauty. I felt more alive as I read.”—Caitlin Doughty, New York Times bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory “A perfect book for almost anyone.”—The Washington Post “An immersive testament to [Enriquez’s] genius.”—Los Angeles Times “An eccentric and enlightening peek into how memorialization happens across the world.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Fascinating . . . Enriquez hides a celebration of life in a book about death.”—Booklist, starred review One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 New Releases of the Fall • A Most Anticipated Book of the Fall: Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Book Riot, Publishers Lunch Cemeteries have great stories and sometimes I steal some for my books. Mariana Enriquez—called by The New York Times a “sorceress of horror”—has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She has visited them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walks among the headstones, “where dying seems much more interesting than being alive.” But when the body of a friend’s mother who was disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship was found in a common grave, Enriquez began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest. In this rich book of essays—“excursions through death,” she calls them—Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris’s catacombs, Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans’s aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Aires’s opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead. Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, myths, hauntology, and more, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enriquez’s passion for cemeteries, revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she tours. Fascinating, spooky, and unlike anything else, Enriquez’s first work of nonfiction, translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, is as original and memorable as the stories and novels for which she’s become so beloved and admired.

My Cemetery Journeys

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

Selva Almada

Inés Garland

Laura Ramos

Virginia Cosin

Claudia Aboaf

Cecilia Szperling

Camila Fabbri

Gabriela Larralde

Sonia Budassi

"No recuerdo cómo ni cuándo vi la obra de Verónica
Gómez por primera vez, pero sí que me resonó profundamente. Le escribí para evaluar su trabajo para un libro álbum, y cuando me mandó la serie Las casas de las niñas inusuales -que ilustra este libro-, descubrí la conexión con Silvina. Eran sus nenas dark. Se lo dije, y ella no hizo mas que confirmarla afinidad 'no premeditada'. Así fue como se empezó a armar la idea de este libro. VerónicaGómez había pintado al óleo -sin saberlo- a las niñas y mujeres ocampianas, y el juego recién arrancaba. En su obra, como en la de Silvina, existe un desfasaje entre la ingenuidad del narrador y la crueldad de lo narrado.
Su imagen naif disimula lo siniestro que hay en ellas.
Todas son pálidas, muchas tienen los ojos blancos, están ausentes, sufren metamorfosis -hay una niña carnero, una señorita bosque, una chica de pecho peludo, niñas muebles-, parecen estar en trance o a punto de ser abducidas. Los detalles que rodean a las mujercitas de Verónica Gómez, así como los que nos narra Silvina para contextualizar sus cuentos, son excesivos, puntillosos, kitsch. Usando un mecanismo maravillosamente similar, Gómez nos pinta alrededor de sus niñas un montón de información. Pensé en convocar a varias escritoras que resonasen con Silvina y proponerles una consigna como las de los talleres: escribir algo inspirado en las chicas dark de los cuentos ocampianos. Lo que fuera que les saliera, algo literario, ensayístico, confesional. Y fueron todos sí.
Ocurre que cuando las mujeres se ponen a tejer, nada las detiene. Fui directo a las primeras ligas: Selva Almada, Mariana Enriquez, Inés Garland, Camila Fabbri, Virginia Cosin, Claudia Aboaf, Cecilia Szperling, Laura Ramos, Gabriela Larralde y Sonia Budassi. Le mandé, a cada una, una obra de Verónica Gómez para que funcionase como disparador, y sucedió la magia". Guchy Fernandez (directora de
GF).

Con obras de Verónica Gómez

Las Chicas Dark de Silvia Ocampo

The spellbinding graphic adaptation of four stories from Mariana Enriquez’s modern horror classic Things We Lost in the Fire Electric, disturbing, and wholly original, the stories of Things We Lost in the Fire explore multiple dimensions of life and death in contemporary Argentina. Each haunting tale simmers with the nation’s troubled history, but among the abandoned houses, black magic, and superstitions, there is also friendship, compassion, humor, and love. Celebrated artist Lucas Nine transforms Enriquez’s unique blend of literary horror into a mesmerizing graphic adaptation of four of her “phenomenal” (Vanity Fair) stories. Featuring more than 100 pages of full-color illustrations, this edition maintains the suspense and psychological terror of Enriquez’s fiction, while adding new layers of visual meaning and immediacy to her “propulsive and mesmerizing” (New York Times) tales.

Things We Lost in the Fire: Four Graphic Stories

WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALIST • BRAM STOKER AWARD FINALIST • A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “Buenos Aires’s sorceress of horror” (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times) “Entertaining, political and exquisitely gruesome, these stories summon terror against the backdrop of everyday horrors. . . . A queen of horror delivers more delightfully twisted stories.”—Los Angeles Times “As vivid and essential as Kafka’s tales.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • IGNYTE AWARD FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE TELEGRAPH, ELECTRIC LIT, PASTE, LATINA MEDIA On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women. Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists. Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”

Stories

A Sunny Place for Shady People

An enchanting, highly personal tour of some of the most iconic cemeteries of the world—part travelogue, part memoir, part “excursions through death,” by the author of Our Share of Night and “queen of horror” (Los Angeles Times) “Not a travelogue so much as a grave-a-logue, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is an exuberant, witty wander among the dead. You could not have a better friend to take you by the hand and lead you for a long traipse among tilting tombstones, dank crypts, and chilling history.”—Joe Hill “Enriquez knows cemeteries are the repositories of life’s pain and beauty. I felt more alive as I read.”—Caitlin Doughty, New York Times bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory “A perfect book for almost anyone.”—The Washington Post “An immersive testament to [Enriquez’s] genius.”—Los Angeles Times “An eccentric and enlightening peek into how memorialization happens across the world.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Fascinating . . . Enriquez hides a celebration of life in a book about death.”—Booklist, starred review A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, ELECTRIC LIT, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY • One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 New Releases of the Fall • A Most Anticipated Book of the Fall: Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Book Riot, Publishers Lunch Cemeteries have great stories and sometimes I steal some for my books. Mariana Enriquez—called by The New York Times a “sorceress of horror”—has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She has visited them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walks among the headstones, “where dying seems much more interesting than being alive.” But when the body of a friend’s mother who was disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship was found in a common grave, Enriquez began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest. In this rich book of essays—“excursions through death,” she calls them—Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris’s catacombs, Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans’s aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Aires’s opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead. Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, myths, hauntology, and more, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enriquez’s passion for cemeteries, revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she tours. Fascinating, spooky, and unlike anything else, Enriquez’s first work of nonfiction, translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, is as original and memorable as the stories and novels for which she’s become so beloved and admired.

La arrolladora obra periodística de Mariana Enriquez, entre la crónica personal y la exploración de sus grandes amores literarios y musicales. Este volumen reúne la obra periodística de Mariana Enriquez. Propulsada por su potente estilo, escribe sobre algunos de sus ídolos y fetiches en ámbitos como la literatura y la música, además de abordar también aspectos de su propia vida. Encontramos en estas páginas desde una entrevista delirante con el legendario Charly García hasta un texto sobre la fijación de los viandantes bonaerenses con el escote de la autora. Agudas piezas personales sobre sus inicios como escritora, la primera vez que la llaman «señora», la decisión de no ser madre o la fascinación por el erotismo homosexual conviven con espléndidos retratos de escritores como Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Le Guin, Ballard, Richard Matheson o Neil Gaiman. Se abordan también las novelas vampíricas y las de temática sado de Anne Rice; figuras excéntricas como las de Hubert Selby Jr., Kenneth Anger, Joe Dallesandro o Mark Ryden; músicos como Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen, los Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Nick Cave o los Manic Street Preachers; actores como Asia Argento, Jared Leto o Daniel Day-Lewis; mitos femeninos como Sylvia Plath, Nahui Olin o Kate Moss... Un libro ineludible para fans de Enriquez y para cualquier amante del periodismo vibrante y la buena literatura.

Mariana Enriquez

Books

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