A failed inventor brings rabbits to an island so that they will completely destroy all existence of these nests from birds whose name nobody knows. In the nightly penumbra, a species extinguished thousands of years ago now appears and walks into the Archduke. The dreams of hotel guests are the object of an unusual theft. The ghost of a mother opens up a Facebook account and requests her daughter’s friendship. A couple about to break up wanders through a hostile motel. In a Parisian banlieue a section of an avenue disappears. These stories hold fabulous transformations that aren’t lived as a liberation but with fear. Elvira Navarro’s relentless precision takes us through lives that fatally deform, dragging us with them. Reading Navarro is like evoking a terrifying shadow, and in the same way that what’s known turns profoundly strange when night hits, in these stories, the characters get lost in their locked-up bedrooms, in their muddy islands, in the mental labyrinths that shake normality and drive us to a hallucinating white noise that nobody can escape from.
Photo credit: Rubén Bastida
Elvira Navarro (1978) studied philosophy. She has published the series The City in Winter and The Happy, the novel A Working Woman (translated by Christina MacSweeney) and the novella Los últimos días de Adelaida García Morales (The Last Days of Adelaida García Morales). In Spain her work has been awarded the Premio Jaén de Novela, the Premio Andalucía de la Crítica and the Premio Tormenta for best new author. The short story collection Rabbit Island (also translated by Christina MacSweeney) is her latest publication. In 2010 she was included in Granta’s ‘Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists’ and in 2014 El Cultural chose La trabajadora (A Working Woman) among its ten best novels of the year. In 2019 the cultural supplement Babelia named La isla de los conejos (Rabbit Island) as one of the ten best books of that year. She worked as an editor for the Madrid publishing house Caballo de Troya in 2015. In addition to English, her work has been translated into French, Swedish, Italian and Turkish.
Ivan Radosavljević was born in Jagodina in 1969. He is an editor, literary critic and translator. He graduated from the Department of World Literature of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in 1993. He was a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Reč (1994-1999), an editor in the publishing house Stubovi kulture (1999-2013), and since 2013 he’s been an editor in the publishing house Književna radionica Rašić (in English: Rasic Literary Workshop).