Mariana Enriquez in Conversation with Ericka Beckman and Hugo Salas

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to invite you to join us in welcoming the award-winning Argentine writer and journalist Mariana Enríquez. On this occasion, Enríquez will engage in a conversation about her work with Professor Ericka Beckman and PhD candidate Hugo Salas.Friday, April 194PM ESTPerelman Center for Political Science and Economics (PCPSE) Auditorium. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS), with the support of the English and the Comparative Literature Departments. About Mariana EnríquezConsidered one of the most spellbinding narrators in Latin American literature today, Enríquez has captivated audiences worldwide with her unique approach to the horror genre and her vivid and eccentric non-fiction. Her work has been featured in countless anthologies, as well as in prestigious publications such as The New Yorker, Freeman’s, McSweeney’s, Granta UK, Granta en Español, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Asymptote. Enríquez first surprised Argentine audiences with her debut novel Bajar es lo peor (1995), published when she was just a teenager. Her international breakthrough came with the story collection Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego (Things We Lost in the Fire, 2016), which led to the translation of her earlier collection Los peligros de fumar en la cama (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed), then a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. Her novel Nuestra parte de noche (Our Share of Night) won the prestigious Herralde Novel Prize in 2019 and has received international critical acclaim.“Mariana Enriquez is a mesmerizing writer who demands to be read. Like Bolaño, she is interested matters of life and death, and her fiction hits with the force of a freight train. ‘The Dirty Boy’ is one of the most memorable and brave stories I’ve read in years. It lingers in the mind for weeks, and redefined my sense of Buenos Aires, a city I love dearly.”  Dave Eggers “These spookily clear-eyed, elementally intense stories are the business. I find myself no more able to defend myself from their advances than Enriquez’s funny, brutal, bruised characters are able to defend themselves from life as it’s lived."  Helen Oyeyemi “It seems wrong, somehow to call this grouping of Mariana Enriquez’s stories a collection. There is nothing collected about these stories. These stories unsettle; they disturb; they disquiet. Read them!” Kelly Link “Startlingly brilliant…. moments build, becoming minor notes in an incantation. Our Share of Night is a mouthpiece for human darkness that, like Dalí’s cards, reveals the unspeakable. It is an enchanting, shattering, once-in-a-lifetime reading experience.” Danielle Trussoni, The New York Times “Although it most certainly possesses complexity and ambition in spades, the book is, more than anything else, an old-fashioned flesh-creeper… Sprawling and intense, a masterclass in how to maintain narrative discipline over a long period of time… This is done without any archness of tone and without any indication that this kind of storytelling is in need of elevation. On the contrary it is done with absolute relish and evident delight… remarkably focused and controlled… Enriquez has a voice and a talent that are altogether distinctive. Our Share of Night [is] entirely unique – a long serious novel which has all the delights of horror fiction. It is a considerable achievement that deserves to be read on all sides of the literary aisle” J. S. Barnes, Literary Review