Mothers and Dogs: Stories

Fabio Morábito, Curtis Bauer (Translated by)

$15.99

Publication Date: May 16th, 2023

Publisher:

Other Press

ISBN:

9781635420821

Pages:

192

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Description

Drawing from everyday life in Mexico and abroad, these subtle, unsettling stories probe the boundaries between sanity and madness, life and death, safety and danger.

The first story collection from prize-winning author Fabio Morábito available in English, Mothers and Dogs features fifteen tales that show the emotional extremes in seemingly trivial details and quotidian situations: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn’t been fed than they do about their dying mother; when the lights go out on a racetrack, a man’s evening jog turns into a savage battle between runners; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother.
As he deftly explores feelings of loneliness and despair endemic in modern society, Morábito weaves threads of unexpected humor and lightness.

About the Author

Fabio Morábito was born in Egypt to an Italian family. When he was fifteen, his family relocated from Milan to Mexico City, and he has written all his work in Spanish ever since. He has published five books of poetry, five short-story collections, one book of essays, and two novels, and has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes, most recently the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, Mexico’s highest literary award, for Home Reading Service (Other Press, 2021). His work has been translated into several languages. He lives in Mexico City.

Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.

Praise for Mothers and Dogs: Stories

“The stories in Fabio Morábito’s Mothers and Dogs, beautifully translated by Curtis Bauer, are deceptively plainspoken. That’s how Morábito hooks you. The directness of the writing belies just how strange the most ordinary-seeming day can and does become. I flat-out loved this book.” —Peter Orner, author of Still No Word from You and Maggie Brown & Others

“Morábito has a remarkable gift for capturing those moments where we’re pushed outside of ourselves, beyond our comfortable routines and social scripts, suddenly in a different story than the one we thought we were living—those little lies and encounters between strangers that haunt someone for a lifetime. The results are just as often subtly, simply poignant as they are shocking and mordantly funny. A master storyteller at work.” —Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

“Morábito’s stories are haunting in their loneliness, cutting in their absurdity, surprising in their hilarity. They conjure vivid urban landscapes populated by individuals weighed down by memories, landscapes that feel both familiar and oddly surreal. These stories will stay with me for a very long time.” —Dur e Aziz Amna, author of American Fever