A Date with the Lady

A junkie looking for one last fix in a town full of ghosts .

This is a ghost story. A junkie has gone to El Zapotal to die - to rent a room in this crumbling backwater, melt into one last fix, and not come back. For someone so ready to no longer be alive, though, he can’t stop clinging to the past. His old dog, Kid, who he abandoned. His love, Valerie, who he introduced to drugs. There’s no such thing as a good memory.

El Zapotal doesn’t want him either. The people aren’t welcoming, the streets are empty except for strays, and he’s having trouble pacing his supply. As the drugs run out, the line between what’s real and what’s not blurs to the point of illegibility, and we’re left wandering a tenderly described hinterland of despair, hunger, and regret. García Elizondo has given us an homage to Pedro Páramo, a descent for the ages, a long goodbye with no clear line between the living and dead.

Mateo García Elizondo (Mexico City, 1987)**** holds a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Westminster in London, and a PHD in Journalism from the London School of Journalism. He wrote the film scripts for Desierto, Domingo (2013) and Clickbait (2018) and his fiction has appeared in media such as Granta, Nexos, Epoka and Huun.Arte/pensamiento desde México . His work as a graphic novel scriptwriter has been published by WP Comics, Premier Comics, Swampline Comics and the magazine Entropy . This, his debut novel, A Date with the Lady won the City of Barcelona Award. In 2021 he was listed by Granta magazine as one of the world’s best writers in Spanish under thirty-five years of age.

Robin Myers is a New York-born, Mexico City-based poet and translator. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming from the_Kenyon Review_, the_Harvard Review_, Two Lines, The Offing, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, and Inventory . In 2009, she was named a fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA); in 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Literary Translation Centre (BILTC); and in 2017, and she was selected to participate in the feminist translation colloquium A-Fest. Recent book-length translations include Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (Cardboard House Press), Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press), an_d Cars on Fire_ by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books).