Mouthful of Birds
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE, 2019
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A SPELLBINDINGLY CREEPY COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES, FROM AN ARGENTINIAN LITERARY STAR
'The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin's darkly humorous tales.' J.M. Coetzee
Spine-tingling and unexpected, unearthly and strange, the stories of Mouthful of Birds are impossible to forget.
The crunch of a bird's wing.
A cloud of butterflies, so beautiful it smothers.
A crimson flash of blood across an artist's canvas.
Samanta Schweblin's writing expertly blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday, pulling the reader into a world that is at once nightmarish and beautiful. An exhilarating tour de force guaranteed to leave the pulse racing.
'This is our world, and sharp-focused, but stripped of its usual meanings... Brutal violence is twisted into horrific, intensely experienced art.' Guardian
*Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, 2019*
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schweblin (Fever Dream) once again deploys a heavy dose of nightmare fuel in this frightening, addictive collection. In "Headlights," Felicity, a just-married woman whose husband has abandoned her by the side of the road, hears and senses an approaching swarm of jilted women in the pitch black fields around her ("The laughter is closer now; it completely drowns out the crying"). "Preserves" is about a married couple expecting their first child and deciding to alter nature's course. In the title story, two parents try to figure out what to do about their young daughter, who has started eating live birds. In "Underground," the children in a small mining town dig a massive hole and suddenly disappear, and when their parents go looking for them, they find the hole filled in and empty when they dig it up again. "The Heavy Suitcase of Benavides" follows a man who thinks that he has killed his wife and stuffed her in a suitcase. When he visits his doctor to confess, his doctor responds to the news unexpectedly, leading to a startling ending. Schweblin has a knack for leaving things unsaid: by zeroing in on her characters and settings to an uncomfortably close degree and only hinting at what's at the edges of the perspective, she achieves a constant sense of dread. Schweblin's stories are canny, provocative, and profoundly unsettling.
