And Here Comes Your Next Favorite Latin American Writer

Next year, Open Letter Books will published Chilean author Carlos Labbé’s Navidad and Matanza, which I guarantee will immediately become a favorite of Bolaño and Zambra and Chejfec and Saer fans everywhere. I think this book is going to blow everyone away (specifically looking at you, Scott Esposito) and very well could win that year’s Best Translated Book Award.

I’ll be plugging this more and more over the next few months, but in the meantime, Will Vanderhyden (aka Willsconsin), who is a translator in the University of Rochester’s translation program, just published one of Labbé’s (very) short stories at Alchemy. Here’s the opening:

Emerge, hate first myself and then the mechanical sound of the alarm clock. Be grateful, bury my face in the pillow, put first one foot and then another on the cold floor. Turn on the water heater, run naked to the shower, piss, touch my nipples, sing gringo songs from the radio that have the word God in them, turn off the hot water first so as to freeze, for an instant, my hairy hide. Plug in the electric razor, splash my face with cologne, dry each of my toes and suck my palm because it tastes like soap. Open a window, feel the nakedness of my back against the air coming in from the street, stretch socks over my calves, dress in yellow overalls, draw my damp hair back, pause and close my eyes. Eat oatmeal with milk. Murmur a name, press the elevator button, wave to the crying doorman, hear honking horns, take the colectivo, plead, want, fake, pay, slam the car door as hard as possible, go into the gas station, greet or not greet, put the marker on zero, squeeze the trigger of the nozzle, fill the tank, fill the tank, fill the tank, perspire, guess the color of the next vehicle, touch the crotch of the calendar model and feel that it is paper. Three o’clock, take off my hat, wash each finger of my hand, find the scissors and take them with me, put the tip of my index finger in my left eye, feel I have something and that something comes to life.

Click here to read the full piece.