Roque Larraquy is an Argentinian writer, screenwriter, professor of narrative and audiovisual design, and the author of two books, La comemadre and Informe sobre ectoplasma animal. Comemadre will be his first book published in English.

Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award
Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2018 in Fiction

"Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page--a wickedly entertaining ride." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Grotesque, outrageous, and insanely funny, [Comemadre] has almost no equal in literature." --BOMB

"Sad, funny, and pitch-perfect." --World Literature Today

"The prose is distilled but rich--like dark chocolate." --Chicago Tribune

"Through his callous, narcissistic narrators, Larraquy interrogates the ethics of art and science, and the inhumanity we sanction in the name of intellectual achievement. Slyly funny and viscerally affecting, in a fluid translation by Heather Cleary, Comemadre is the medicine-meets-art horror story of my dreams." --Huffington Post

"The absurd is planted and buried throughout Comemadre, creating a sense of constant doubt and uncertainty. The writing is sparse and evocative, even as it takes considerable risks. The effect accomplishes a great deal in short spaces." --Full Stop

"Comemadre creates a full circle of the grotesqueries humans inflict upon one another in pursuit of immortality. . . . Read Larraquy to experience a strange waking dream from which there is no escape." --Arkansas International

"It's a brief novel, but its impact is massive." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we're confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition." --The Millions

"Comemadre is a powerful critique of our administered, bureaucratic world, full of petty men wielding power with impunity." --Three Percent

"Layered without growing dense, the book is crisply comic, scenes punctuated like punchlines. That it all happens within a mere 130 pages is a sort of magic trick--the dizzying kind where a body gets sawed in half." --The A.V. Club

"A deeply unnerving and morbidly fascinating novel." --Booklist

"Larraquy ventures into the gothic here, only to push beyond it into an even more disquieting realm of obsession, transformation, and the monstrous unknown." --Words Without Borders

"Funny, grotesque and smart." --Brazos Bookstore

"The gruesome content is handled with an absurdist touch." --Publishers Weekly

"A concise family saga by way of Dennis Cooper by way of a stress nightmare; it's also eminently readable." --Vol. 1 Brooklyn

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Publisher: Coffee House Press

Pub date: 2018-07-10

Length: 152 pages