#8 — a spider weaves, weaves

updates, short stories & recommended translation

Author

Hache Pueyo
August 31, 2024

Hello again,

There are a lot of things to share this month, so let’s start with this: BUT NOT TOO BOLD is now available on Netgalley for reviewers!

I also have two short stories out, both of which can be read for free. The first one is a horror piece about Rosalía, a human-looking creature returning to her ancestral home almost two hundred years after she left, and her sullen godfather Fishhook, who brings her humans for them to share. I’ve been told this one is rather graphic, but if you enjoy horrible people doing horrible things, monsters and gothic vibes, it might be the right story for you:

In front of his eyes was the reason why creatures like them did not like to be seen eating. It was grotesque, even for kin, the pulling of meat, the ripping of tendons, the breaking of bones of those puny little beings that were so like themselves. Without her elders to chaperone her, however, Rosalía cared very little about taboos.

The second is a translation reprinted by Fantástico Guia (brasileiros, a história pode ser lida em português aqui!), originally published in Strange Horizons. It’s a very short tale about watching your grandmother turn into a cocoon in the middle of the living room:

My grandmother turned into a cocoon, and there’s very little left of her now. Some things do remain: the green veins in her arms visible through layers of silk, her short legs, twisted into a curl and wrapped by the translucent web, her black eyes that still blink. Those little dark beads watch me come and go, alarmingly so. If she’s trapped, how can she see? If she’s watching, what does she think?

Lastly, if you can, please donate to Operation Olive Branch to help Gaza, and to Sudan Funds, where you can find a masterlist of campaigns and resources if you don’t know where to start.

See you next month,

Hache 🕷️

Minor Detail 🇵🇸 تفصيل ثانوي

(Adania Shibli, 2017, trans. Elisabeth Jaquette)

This novella is divided in two parts mixing fact and fiction: the first begins with a real story set 1949, one year after the Nakba, where a platoon of Israeli settlers captures, gang rapes and kills a Palestinian girl in the Negev desert, while the second, in the point of view of a modern-day woman in Ramallah who decides to investigate the crime that happened exactly 25 years before the day she was born.

Minor Detail is quiet, purposeful and devastating. Most of its brutality is not shown through explicit violence, but in the cold repetition and echoes of atrocities in its two mirrored halves. I know many people will avoid reading it based on the themes alone, but this short book is worth giving a shot.