Women in Translation Book Club reads "The Dangers of Smoking in Bed"

Welcome to Women In Translation (formerly Annotated), a Bookends & Beginnings book club! We focus on genre-bending, boundary-pushing fiction in bite-sized packages. All selected titles are translated works by women and are around 200 pages.

For Monday, November 3rd, we will read Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez's spooky collection of stories titled , translated by Megan McDowell. We will focus on the earlier stories in this collection to allow for anyone who may have gotten their copies a bit later in the month.

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 this 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.

All book club attendees are required to purchase tickets through Eventbrite. You may buy the book or select the option to buy a certificate of the same value, to be redeemed on any in-store purchases on or before the event date. Certificates can be used on all in-store items except at the MiniBar.

This meeting will take place from 6:30 to 7:30 PM, with snacks and drinks at the bar from 6:00 to 6:30. WIT Book Club meetings are led by Gloria, the new Events and Marketing Support staff at Bookends & Beginnings.

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