Mouthful of Birds: Stories

　　莎曼達(Samanta Schweblin)，當代著名的西語系作家，來自阿根廷。詭譎迷人的文風，總讓人感覺到失眠的夜晚，靈光一閃，襲來的孤寂與暗示，都讓人心跳加速，在虛幻與真實之間，游移不定。

　　短篇小說集Mouthful of Birds，集結多篇故事，直擊人性深處。莎曼達再次重現潛伏在讀者心中的惡夢，恐怖而又令人著迷的故事。　在〈頭條〉(Headlights)一篇中，一位新婚的女人，被丈夫拋棄在路旁。一旁的田野傳來吵鬧的聲響。在〈保護〉(Preserves)一篇中，一對新婚夫婦，滿心期待他們第一個小孩，但他們卻發現女兒喜歡吃生的鳥類。驚恐中，他們想辦法找出問題。而〈地底〉(Underground)一篇，講述小礦村的小孩，不斷挖出一個又一個巨大的探洞穴，並且消失在其中。在〈沉重的行李箱〉(The heavy suitcase of Benavides)，則是一名男子殺了他的妻子，並且將她塞入行李箱中。

　　莎曼達善於保留讀者想像空間，在說與不說之間，營造詭譎的氣氛與意外的故事情節，深受讀者喜愛。不斷探索小說中的人物性格，挑戰人性邊緣的獨立視角。精緻而刺激的恐怖小品，陪你度過每個孤寂的夜晚。（文/博客來編譯）

　　A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star.

　　Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don’t let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection.

　　Schweblin’s stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing, and the line between the real and the strange blur.

　　Praise for Mouthful of Birds

　　"Surreal, disturbing, and decidedly original.” —Library Journal, starred review

　　"Schweblin once again deploys a heavy dose of nightmare fuel in this frightening, addictive collection…canny, provocative, and profoundly unsettling." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

　　"Schweblin builds dense and uncanny worlds, probing the psychology of human relationships and the ways we perceive existence and interpret culture, with dark humor and sharp teeth. An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author." —Kirkus Review

　　"Intense… [has] a visceral effect as Schweblin navigates the extremes of her characters’ actions and thoughts, both healing and destructive.” —Booklist

　　"The Grimm brothers and Franz Kafka pay a visit to Argentina in Samanta Schweblin’s darkly humorous tales of people who have slipped through cracks or fallen down holes into alternate realities." —JM Coetzee

　　Praise for Fever Dream

　　2017 International Man Booker Prize finalist

　　"To call Schweblin’s novella eerie and hallucinatory is only to gesture at its compact power; the fantastical here simply dilates a reality we begin to accept as terrifying and true.... Schweblin’s book is suffused with haunting images and big questions." —New York Times Book Review

　　"Samanta Schweblin’s electric story reads like a Fever Dream." —Vanity Fair

　　"I picked up Fever Dream in the wee hours, and a low, sick thrill took hold of me as I read it. I was checking the locks in my apartment by page thirty. By the time I finished the book, I couldn’t bring myself to look out the windows…. [T]he genius of Fever Dream is less in what it says than in how Schweblin says it, with a design at once so enigmatic and so disciplined that the book feels as if it belongs to a new literary genre altogether." —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

　　"A nauseous, eerie read, sickeningly good." —Emma Cline, The Girls

　　"Subtle, dreamy and indelibly creepy." —The Economist (Best Books of 2017)

　　"Never have I ever been so afraid to read a book right before bed." —Marie Claire

　　"A spare, hypnotic literary page-turner." —O, The Oprah Magazine

　　"Mesmerizing... Schweblin, though, is an artist of remarkable restraint… Schweblin renders psychological trauma with such alacrity that the conceit of a poisoned environment feels almost beside the point." —The Washington Post

　　"This small debut novel packs a mighty, and lingering, punch.... [A] compact, but explosive, package. Schweblin delivers a skin-prickling masterclass in dread and suspense.... With virtuoso skill, well served in Megan McDowell’s finely textured translation, Schweblin fuses a study in maternal anxiety with an ecological horror story. She refracts both strands through the eerie prism of her narrative, almost as if Henry James had scripted a disaster movie about toxic agribusiness." —The Economist

　　"Elusiveness takes a terrifyingly creepy form in this dazzling short novel." —NPR

　　"Unsettling... [T]he novel represents a perfect marriage of form and subject, in which its narrative instability — which is so of the literary moment — viscerally recreates the insecurities of life in the Argentine countryside today.... [Schweblin] has found ways to electrify and destabilize the physical world... [Fever Dream is] the scariest of all things: a ghost story that is, in essence, true." —Los Angeles Times

Author

　　Samanta Schweblin is the author of the novel, Fever Dream, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and her first book translated into English. She was chosen as one of the twenty-two best writers in Spanish under the age of 35 by Granta and is on the Bogotá39-2017 list. Her stories in Spanish have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and in English have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into twenty languages. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.

　　Megan McDowell has translated books by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors, and her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, and Vice, among other publications. She lives in Chile.