January - Readings

Description

"Hair-raisingly good . . . the plot explodes." – Lily Meyer, The New York Review of Books

“Elegant and forceful – I couldn’t put it down.” – Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

** ONE of THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 **

A pioneering, revelatory masterpiece of modern literature that conjures the life of 16-year-old girl living on the Argentine pampas — now in English for the very first time

With echoes of Edith Wharton’s Summer, this radical feminist novel broke the silence around abortion to reshape the way women’s bodies and rights were perceived in 20th-century Argentina

Perfect for readers of Tove Ditlevsen, Annie Ernaux’s Happening, and Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows

A radical feminist text, January was the first Argentine novel to represent rape from the survivor’s perspective and to explore the life-threatening risks pregnancy posed, in a society where abortion was both outlawed and taboo.

In the sweltering Argentine pampas, all things bow to Nefer. Reeds nod when she digs her heels into her horse, unripe peaches snap and fall as she gallops past. Sickly-sweet air bends, churns in Nefer’s throat.

Nefer measures the distance between her body and the table, and feels something filling her up, turning against her. Her belly swells.

Desperate, Nefer visits a local medicine woman who is known to perform abortions but Nefer becomes too afraid to explain why she is truly there.

She attends confession at church but cannot confide in the priest. During a fierce argument with her mother, she finally blurts out her secret.

With a narcotic musicality and voice scorched through with honesty, Gallardo hangs before us an experience that has been lived and ignored a thousand times over. Nefer closes her eyes. We careen to her and we see.

About the Author

Born in 1936 in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Hebe Uhart is one of Argentina’s most celebrated modern writers. She published two novels, Camilo asciende (1987) and Mudanzas (1995), but is better known for her short stories, where she explores the lives of ordinary characters in small Argentine towns. Her Collected Stories won the Buenos Aires Book Fair Prize (2010), and she received Argentina's National Endowment of the Arts Prize (2015) for her overall oeuvre, as well as the Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Prize (2017).

Maureen Shaughnessy’s translations from Spanish include works by Hebe Uhart, Nora Lange, Margarita García Robayo, and Luis Nuño. She has also translated Guadalupe Urbina’s Maya folktales, as well as several Cañari legends. Shaughnessy’s translations have been published by Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, The Brooklyn Rail, and Asymptote. She lives in Bariloche, Argentina.

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