Pilar Adón Reading Tour!!
This September, Pilar Adón—author of Of Beasts and Fowls (translated by Katie Whittemore), winner of Spain’s Premio Nacional de Narrativa last year—will embark on a five-city, six-stop tour hitting several of the best indie bookshops in America, and sharing this incredibly beautiful, compelling novel of a woman who, while trying to clear her mind, finds herself trapped in a gothic estate populated by a cultish group of women . . . More info on that below, but here’s the important part—the scheduled public events:
New York: Wednesday, Sept 4 @ 7pm ET
Reading and Conversation with Tana Oshima
N+1 Event Space
37 Greenpoint Ave #316
Brooklyn, NY 11022
Chicago: Friday, Sept 6 @ 7pm CT
Reading and Conversation with Chad W. Post
Instituto Cervantes Library
31 W. Ohio St.
Chicago, IL 60654
Chicago: Saturday, Sept 7 at 7pm CT
Reading and Conversation with Tatjana Gajic
Exile in Bookville
Fine Arts Building
410 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 210
Chicago, IL 60605
Dallas: Wednesday, Sept 11 @ 6pm CT
Wild Detectives
314 Eighth St.
Dallas, TX 75208
Friday, Sept 13 @ 7pm PT:
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W. Burnside
Portland, OR 97209
Tuesday, Sept 17 @ 7pm PT:
Third Place Books
6504 20th Ave. NE
Seattle, WA 98115
If you’re reading this before September 1st, please be aware that Of Beasts and Fowls is currently 40% off thanks to our Women in Translation Month sale!
*
“A funerary poem about a bird flying underground; a psychodrama of two sisters drowning in the mirror of memory; a center of a necrophilic labyrinth; Virginia Woolf’s Rhoda lost in John Hawkes’s Travesty. Pilar Adon’s novel is the most haunting I have read in years.”—Mircea Cărtărescu, winner of the Dublin Literary Award
Summer is ending and Coro, an artist frightened of what her paintings of her dead sister may represent, gets in her car one night and starts to drive, with no plan or destination. After a wrong turn down a narrow dirt road, she runs out of gas outside the gates of a large and isolated house called Bethany, a place inhabited exclusively by a small group of women who seem to exist in a closed, hierarchical system a world apart. The women of Bethany live closely with the natural and animal world, celebrate rites and rituals, and, like devotees of an ancestral cult, all dress the same. Most unsettlingly, they seem to know who Coro is already. In fact, they have been expecting her.
How the women came to live in Bethany, why they believe Coro is destined to be there, and most pressing, why won’t they let her leave are questions Coro must face as she struggles between the instinct to escape and the sense that something larger is at work.
When Bethany’s careful balance is disturbed—with violent consequences—by the appearance of a mysterious man who claims the house and land are his, Coro will find herself forced to meet her own ghosts, reckon with her choices, and accept that Bethany might just be where she belongs.
Winner of Spain’s Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2023, Of Beasts and Fowls introduces a grand talent new to English audiences in a haunting novel rife with natural descriptions, signs and symbols, and a sense of the uncanny.
*
Pilar Adón was born in Madrid in 1971 and is the author of four novels, including The Mayflies (forthcoming from Open Letter), several short story collection, and four volumes of poetry. She received the Ojo Critico Prize for Viajes inocentes, and won the Premio Francisco Umbral al Libro del Año, Premio Cálamo, and the Premio de la Critica for Of Beasts and Fowls.
Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Full-length translations include works by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, and Katixa Agirre. Forthcoming translations include novels by Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 to translate Moreno’s In Case We Lose Power, and was a finalist for the Spain-USA Prize for her translation of Katixa Agirre’s Mothers Don’t.
Leave a Reply