Reservoir Bitches: Stories

A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.

＂Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.＂ In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

Dahlia de la Cerda is a writer and activist based in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She is the author of Perras de Reserva, which won the 2019 Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Comala, and Desde los Zulos. She is also the cofounder of the feminist organization Morras Help Morras. Reservoir Bitches is her English-language debut.

Julia Sanches translates literature from Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into English. Born in Brazil, she now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Heather Cleary is an award-winning translator of poetry and prose whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the National Book Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction.