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Start giftingThe Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Bookseller recommendation
“Newly available in English, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a knockout collection of literary horror by Argentine journalist Mariana Enríquez, read flawlessly and tantalizingly by Rebecca Soler. Readers will learn of Angelita, a walking infant corpse; of a woman who fetishizes the human heart; of an enigmatic pop star whose latest album, Meat, inspires a new kind of craze. All of the stories are narrated by women—clever women who struggle to express their sexuality, who want to believe in something, who nurture and devour at once. Fans of Carmen Maria Machado, what are you waiting for?”
— Mary • Raven Book Store
Bookseller recommendation
“"The Dangers of Smoking in Bed" by Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, revisits themes found in her 2017 collection "Things We Lost in the Fire." Her disquieting stories, populated by ghosts, disappeared adults and exploited children, examine economic pain, social unrest and violence through the lens of literary horror. Characters observing the slow burn of a society in decay find themselves asking, as the titular story does, "Why not just let the fire keep going and do its job?" Supernatural elements become compelling metaphors for societal breakdown. In ""The Cart,"" a poor neighborhood experiences bad luck after a homeless man--worse off than the people there--is driven away. ""There had to be an accumulation of misfortune for the neighborhood to feel like something strange was going on,"" says the narrator. Jobs are lost, utilities turned off and food is hard to come by, causing people to turn feral to survive. The only family left untouched by bad luck, one that offered some comfort to the homeless man, is forced to flee before neighbors turn on them. ""We were scared, but fear doesn't look the same as desperation,"" the son in this family knows. Child exploitation is represented as an actual haunting of society. In ""Rambla Triste,"" abused children wander the streets of Barcelona, leaving a stench and creating havoc for everyone. In ""Kids Who Come Back,"" children in Buenos Aires who were lost or disappeared begin to reappear, unchanged, at the same time. People have ""no idea what was happening and couldn't explain it; they only knew that they were very afraid."" Josefina, in ""The Well,"" discovers her paralyzing fears result from trusted adults who used a sorceress to rid themselves of fear and pass it to her when she was only a child. ""They said they would take care of you. But they didn't take care of you,"" she is told. Adults do not save the children in these stories. It's impossible to miss the fear that permeates The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Young girls are afraid to leave their homes, a ghost baby is afraid to be alone and young men are afraid to stay in the cities. Throughout, Enriquez skillfully uses the tropes of horror to expose the everyday atrocities that occur in societies that abandon the fight against corruption. Even as these stories provide chills, they elicit a deep feeling of sadness for innocence lost. -reviewed for Shelf Awareness 11-17-20"”
— Cindy • The River's End Bookstore
Summary
“The beautiful, horrible world of Mariana Enriquez, as glimpsed in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, with its disturbed adolescents, ghosts, decaying ghouls, the sad and angry homeless of modern Argentina, is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • FINALIST: Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ray Bradbury Prize, Kirkus Prize • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, New York Public Library, Electric Lit, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews
Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma.
Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.
Reviews
“The beautiful, horrible world of Mariana Enriquez, as glimpsed in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, with its disturbed adolescents, ghosts, decaying ghouls, the sad and angry homeless of modern Argentina, is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro“Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is haunted by the specter of late-twentieth-century Latin American history. . . . Yet because the fiction is so alive, the experience of being in her world is enjoyable.”—Francine Prose, New York Review of Books
“Stories of spirits and disappearances collectively address the mystery of loss through narratives that are as gripping as they are chilling.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Enriquez’s gaze throughout the collection is unflinching, taking readers into dark and grotesque territory, yet it is her morality, a pervasive sense of right and wrong, that anchors each story and prevents the collection from veering into the lurid horror of tabloid tragedy.”—Ploughshares
“Like her Chilean neighbor, the late Roberto Bolaño, Mariana Enriquez crafts fiction about the darkest recesses of the human heart that makes you feel light after reading it—uplifted by the precision and poetry of her characters’ voices.”—The A.V. Club
“The Dangers of Smoking in Bed establishes Enríquez as a premier literary voice. Enríquez's extraordinary—and extraordinarily ominous—fiction holds up a mirror to our bewildering times, when borders between the everyday and the inexplicable blur, and converge.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan. . . . Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[A] group of off-kilter tales enlivened by captivating unease. Every facet of her writing unsettles. . . . Enriquez, superbly translated by Megan McDowell, masterfully darts from disturbing to funny to repulsive without jarring the reader’s momentum—or, rather, the disturbance is built into the momentum.”—Tasteful Rude
“An atmospheric assemblage of cunning and cutting Argentine gothic tales . . . insidiously absorbing, like quicksand.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Enriquez’s wide-ranging imagination and ravenous appetite for morbid scenarios often reaches sublime heights. Adventurous readers will be rewarded in these trips into the macabre.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Enriquez['s] . . . straightforward delivery and matter-of-fact tone that belie the wild, gasp-worthy action unfolding on the page.”—Booklist
“Rotting little ghosts, heartbeat fetishes, curses and witches and meat: Each of these stories is a luscious, bewitching nightmare. I adore this book.”—Kirsty Logan, author of The Gracekeepers
“I loved these twisted tales, these lustful whispers in the dark. There is some serious power in this writing.”—Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters Expand reviews