Cockfight
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This Ecuadorian short story collection explores domestic horrors and everyday violence, a "grotesque, unflinching" portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America (Publishers Weekly).
“Ampuero’s literary voice is tough and beautiful at once: her stories are exquisite and dangerous objects.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.
In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.
Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ampuero's grotesque, unflinching English-language debut looks at women's experience of trauma and survival in an unnamed South American country. In the title story, a young woman covers herself in rooster blood and intestines to drive away older men who try to take advantage of her. In "Pups," an unnamed woman returns to her stifling hometown and visits a man she'd grown up with who forced her to perform oral sex when she was 12 and he was 13. Back in his apartment years later, voluntarily reenacting the experience, she crunches a cockroach under her knee and notes that the man "smells like an abandoned elderly person." In "Mourning," the collection's standout, teenage Marta takes beatings from her father to protect her sister, Mar a, who in turn faces gang rape at the hands of their older brother by men from the neighborhood after they discover she's not a virgin. In retaliation, Marta and Mar a poison their brother. After he dies, the sisters' joyful dance comes as welcome relief from Ampuero's nearly relentless violence and nightmarish imagery. While some of the stories are drowned by horrific details, such as the ratlike babies in "Monsters," others offer a glaring view of the impact of misogynistic violence and oppression. This will appeal to fans of unrepentant feminist fiction.
