The Plains

After a loss, a year in the country: four seasons to transform a garden and a self.

’In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible, ’ our narrator tells us. In this remote house and garden, time is almost palpable; it goes by without haste and brings into sharp relief even the tiniest details: insects, the sound of the rain, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. Past and present are equally weighted and visible here, revealing themselves slowly with every season and turn of the spade.So a year unfolds. A garden takes shape as his connection deepens to this place, becoming a shelter from everyone and everything, perhaps even from himself. We see the ants devouring the chard, we hear the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie, and we learn about his great love, Ciro. The humid sheets in the country, the carefully renovated apartment in the city and the painful, inexplicable break-up that prompted him to take refuge in this patch of now-carefully tended land.

Federico Falco (General Cabrera, Córdoba, Argentina, 1977) is an Argentinian writer and poet. He holds a BA in Communications from Blas Pascal University in Argentina and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. In 2004, he was given the Young Writers Award by the Spanish Cultural Centre of Córdoba, Argentina. In 2005, he received a grant for improvement from the National Trust for the Arts of Argentina, and in 2009, a scholarship from New York University and the Banco Santander Foundation. Granta selected him as one of The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010. The Plains is his most recent novel. In 2021 it won the Medifé Prize in Argentina and was the runner up for the Herralde Prize in Spain.

Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University and is a Presidential Professor at the University of Tulsa.