The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez | Tasteful Rude
Stepping into a Mariana Enriquez story, everything at first appears normal: people, furniture, lighting; it’s all there; nothing’s amiss. Yet an undeniable disquiet pervades. You don’t know why exactly, but you are certain something is wrong. Eventually and invariably, you discover that you are right. Though she has been publishing fiction and journalism for nearly thirty years in her native Argentina, so far only two books have been translated from their original Spanish into English: Things We Lost in the Fire and now The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. They are both story collections in which the oxymoronic phrase “magic realism” manifests to an extreme. They feature ghosts, witches, curses and cannibals while being equally rife with sexual violence, juntas, self-harm, and all manner of vividly rendered trauma. Continue reading…
Jonathan Russell Clark 