Living Things

WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARD

This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction

Living Things follows four recent graduates - Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex - who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don’t go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living in a campground, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration, and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist’s thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling.

＂Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I’ve read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world.＂ - Dizz Tate, author of Brutes

＂Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It’s a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description.＂ - James Greer, author of Bad Eminence

＂Gorgeously labyrinthine.＂ - Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

Munir Hachemi’s career as a writer began with him selling his stories in the form of fanzines in the bars of the Lavapiés neighbourhood of Madrid. He is the author of Living Things (2018) and El árbol viene (The Tree Comes) (2023), and is also a translator from Chinese and English. In 2021, he appeared on Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Novelists list. He currently lives in Buenos Aires.

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. Born in Brazil, she currently resides in the United States.