#2 — a spider weaves, weaves

recommended stories & resources

Hello, and welcome back.

February was a slow month, but I’ll have updates about my upcoming novella BUT NOT TOO BOLD soon! Meanwhile, you can preorder it or add it to Goodreads. Now, If you’re looking for something quick to read, try Dante Luiz’s ESCOBAR MEDINA PLAYS GOD, published by Interzone last month. It’s a hilarious short story about a horrible trans billionaire/tech bro and his ambitious plans of impregnating his (infertile) wife. I also greatly enjoyed Liza Wemakor’s novella LOVING SAFOA, a beautiful romance between a human woman and a Ghanaian vampire published by Neon Hemlock.

I wish I could only talk about good things in a good, atrocity-free world, but we can’t ignore the genocides happening in Palestine and Sudan. If you’re feeling impotent in the face of so much violence, here are some links that might help if you don’t know where to start:

See you next month!

Hache 🕷️

Bad Girls 🇦🇷 Las Malas

(Camila Sosa Villada, 2019, trans. Kit Maude)

A group of trans sex workers in Sarmiento Park hears a cry in the middle of one of their nightly rounds. Auntie Encarna, their 178-year-old leader, finds an abandoned baby among the bushes and decides to care for him, just like she cares for all the other girls under her wing. Camila, our narrator, is one of them, and we follow her experiences with them, with her family, with clients, with cops. Las Malas (also published in English as The Queens of Sarmiento Park) is a roller-coaster of feelings: it’s beautiful, it’s brutal, it’s provoking, it’s tender, it’s angering, it’s deeply touching.

In Spanish, the synopsis describes this book as “an initiation rite, a fairytale, a horror story, the portrayal of a group, an explosive manifesto, a guided visit to the author’s imagination”, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s one of my favorite books of the past decade, and I can’t wait to read more works by Camila Sosa Villada.