Summer of the Serpent
Summer of the Serpent
Summer of the Serpent
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Description
Description
This surreal, horror-tinged, Guadalajara-set work of Latin American "literature of the unusual" is a kaleidoscopic descent into the small violences and hidden horrors of one sweltering summer, forming a coil of vignettes that slither under the skin for a strange, deeply human portrait of memory, myth, and family. For fans of Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and Brenda Lozano. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1977. In a quiet residential neighborhood, children witness things they can never forget: a serpent girl weeping in a carnival glass box, a neighbor who dangles his dog from a tree, and a ghost who returns night after night, desperate to tell its story. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drift through the season half oblivious, their spirits eroding as the relentless summer wears on. Told in colliding voices--children and adults, ghosts and the haunted, the living and the almost-invisible--The Summer of the Serpent is a prismatic portrait of the past, where memory is shot through with myth. Each narrator offers a fragment of the truth, until the stories twist together into a shape as elusive and mesmerizing as the boa constrictor that winds its way through the neighborhood. Strange yet deeply human, this brilliantly fragmented novel captures the moment when childhood innocence begins to corrode--and how those memories can coil through a lifetime.
About the Author
About the Author
Cecilia Eudave lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, and teaches at the Universidad de Guadalajara. She is the author of the story collections Técnicamente humanos, En primera persona, and Registro de imposibles, as well as the novel Bestiaria vida, which won the Juan García Ponce Literary Award. Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her translations include Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's We Are Green and Trembling (for which she won the National Book Award for translated literature), Andrés Neuman's Bariloche, Isabel Zapata's In Vitro, Eliana Hernández-Pachón's The Brush, and (with Sarah Booker) Cristina Rivera Garza's Death Takes Me.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
Praise for Summer of the Serpent
"Satisfying and thought-provoking . . . Readers will be grateful for the introduction to this distinctive writer."
--Publishers Weekly
"[Cecilia] Eudave's brief novel is intense, tightly layered, and unsettling as it slithers through familiar Latin American literary tropes, shedding its skin like a serpent to give them fresh life . . . Here, traditional logic is unreliable, death is an obsession, and the line between reality and the fantastic is porous."
--Booklist "A gorgeous, strange, kaleidoscopic book of wonders. This spare novel is a feat of magic, and its author is a true visionary."
--Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Paradiso 17 "A voice that knows how to narrate, from a place of tenderness, humor, and amazement, the wonderful absurdity of being alive."
--Patricia Esteban Erlés, author of Las Madres Negras
"Eudave weaves her ars poetica from threads of wonder and the uncanny, where the marvelous appears in every action of the protagonists, alongside chance and the inexorable verdict of a labyrinthine past and future--filled with secrets that demand to be revealed and destinies that must be fulfilled."
--Alberto González, Nexos "Eudave layers everyday life with the anomalous until normality itself begins to fracture . . . A many-voiced narrative that dismantles the illusion of normal life and exposes the darkness beneath childhood."
--Milenio
"A labyrinthine, spectral novel that embodies a contemporary poetics of the unusual. Eudave sketches a larger, astonishing reality--one that coils sinuously around the human world."
--Panoptista
"A novel that inhabits many times at once--a ghostly warning that transforms the reader."
--El Mostrador
"Satisfying and thought-provoking . . . Readers will be grateful for the introduction to this distinctive writer."
--Publishers Weekly
"[Cecilia] Eudave's brief novel is intense, tightly layered, and unsettling as it slithers through familiar Latin American literary tropes, shedding its skin like a serpent to give them fresh life . . . Here, traditional logic is unreliable, death is an obsession, and the line between reality and the fantastic is porous."
--Booklist "A gorgeous, strange, kaleidoscopic book of wonders. This spare novel is a feat of magic, and its author is a true visionary."
--Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Paradiso 17 "A voice that knows how to narrate, from a place of tenderness, humor, and amazement, the wonderful absurdity of being alive."
--Patricia Esteban Erlés, author of Las Madres Negras
"Eudave weaves her ars poetica from threads of wonder and the uncanny, where the marvelous appears in every action of the protagonists, alongside chance and the inexorable verdict of a labyrinthine past and future--filled with secrets that demand to be revealed and destinies that must be fulfilled."
--Alberto González, Nexos "Eudave layers everyday life with the anomalous until normality itself begins to fracture . . . A many-voiced narrative that dismantles the illusion of normal life and exposes the darkness beneath childhood."
--Milenio
"A labyrinthine, spectral novel that embodies a contemporary poetics of the unusual. Eudave sketches a larger, astonishing reality--one that coils sinuously around the human world."
--Panoptista
"A novel that inhabits many times at once--a ghostly warning that transforms the reader."
--El Mostrador
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Soho Press
Pub date:
2026-06-30
Length:
144 pages
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