Living Things
Munir Hachemi, Julia Sanches (translation)WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARD
This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives & Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction
Living Things follows four recent graduates – Munir, G, Ernesto, & Álex – who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm & living in a campground, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling & incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration, & the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist's thoughts on literature & the nature of storytelling.
°°°
"Startling, compulsive, & vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young & alive in a beautiful, horrible world." – Dizz Tate, author of Brutes
°°°
Munir Hachemi (1989) was born in Madrid, Spain. His first stories appeared in fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid, published by the collective Los Escritores Bárbaros. He is the author of Los pistoleros del eclipse, 廢墟, Cosas vivas (Living Things) & El árbol viene (The Tree Comes). He is also a translator from Chinese & English. In 2021, he appeared on Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists list.
Julia Sanches translates works from Portuguese, Spanish, & Catalan into English. She is a founding member of Cedilla & Co., a collective of translators committed to making international voices heard in English, & chair of the Translators Group of the Authors Guild. Her other translations include Boulder by Eva Balthasar & Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver. Her website describes her translations as concise, readable & idiomatic, & the idiomatic certainly proved true with Andrea Abreu’s Dogs of Summer.