Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
These eleven stories from one of Grantas Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists combine gritty surrealism with explosive interior meditations, traversing the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called non-inventor brings snow-white rabbits to an island inhabited exclusively by birds, with horrific results. In Myotragus a privileged mans understanding of the world is violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere in these stories that map dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards, an unsightly paw grows from a writers earlobe and a grandmother floats silently in the corner of the room.