Good and Evil and Other Stories - by Samanta Schweblin (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

INTERNATIONAL BESTELLER - A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales by Samanta Schweblin, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature and three-time Booker Prize finalist.

"Nobody understands the balance of light and darkness of the human mind as well as Samanta Schweblin. She is a master of the edge, of the contour, the suggestion. The most brilliant writer of short stories writing today, she now delivers her most haunting, fierce and provocative book."--Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

"Schweblin creates characters whose lifelines reach some of the most extraordinary questions ever articulated in our literature." --Karen Russell, author of The Antidote and Swamplandia!

"In Samanta Schweblin's hands a single story becomes a theory of just about everything. You can hear all the atoms of the universe bouncing around. Remarkably taut, clear, precise, and yet capable of capturing the extent of our human messiness, these stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside." --Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

The characters of Good and Evil find themselves at a point of no return, dazzled by the glare of impending tragedy. Vulnerable and profoundly human, they become trapped in the instant in which the uncanny has lurched into their lives. Some are transformed, some are isolated, others waver between guilt or tenderness. All of them are riven by uncertainty.

Schweblin's prose uses tension and truth to construct a literary universe in which the monsters of everyday life come so close to us that we can almost feel their breath. Her writing provokes awe and disquiet, a state of alarm that at the same time transports us to a hypnotic world as recognizable as it is strange.

Review Quotes

"No one writes like Samanta Schweblin. Her narratives are sui generis--wonderfully unpredictable and invitingly strange." --Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home

"Time and again in her masterful new collection, Schweblin creates characters whose lifelines reach some of the most extraordinary questions ever articulated in our literature." --Karen Russell, author of The Antidote and Swamplandia!

"In Samatha Schweblin's hands a single story becomes a theory of just about everything. You can hear all the atoms of the universe bouncing around. Remarkably taut, clear, precise, and yet capable of capturing the extent of our human messiness, these stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside." --Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

"Nobody understands the balance of light and darkness of the human mind as well as Samanta Schweblin. She is a master of the edge, of the contour, the suggestion. The most brilliant writer of short stories writing today, she now delivers her most haunting, fierce and provocative book."--Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

"Samanta Schweblin combines the urgent propulsion that characterizes all great storytelling with precise, if uncanny, descriptions of human feelings that often go unnamed, those ambiguous zones of human reality where awe, dread, and desire mingle." --Siri Hustvedt, author of Memories of the Future

"Samanta Schweblin has a rare ability to write stories that are more than just stories: they are bits of obsessions, fragments of nightmares, desires like parasites that colonize us, because Samanta knows. She understands the delicate and monstrous music that is shaped from our shadows, from the ghosts we carry within us. That is why to read her is to remember; to read her is to witness, in bewilderment, a miracle made of disturbance and light." --Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender is the Flesh

"The atmosphere in these stories, crafted with striking clarity, foreshadows that at some point, everything will go awry, and the effects of that twist will haunt the protagonists forever. These are not ghost stories. They are something far worse and far better: they are stories about human beings." --Leila Guerriero, author of La Llamada

"Stellar--extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled." --Anne Enright, author of The Gathering

"Reading Samanta Schweblin is a thoroughly immersive experience. These beautifully crafted and eerily unsettling stories completely hypnotised me. This is the sort of storytelling which resonates in the head, the heart and all mysterious parts in between. I wish I could write like this." --Jan Carson, author of The Fire Starters

"These stories understand the secret moments and strange connections that resonate through a person's life--and they explore these intimacies with a razor sharp edge. Samantha Schweblin is at the top of her game." --Heather Parry, author of Orpheus Builds a Girl

"Each entry is more luminous and shocking than the last. This establishes Schweblin as a master storyteller." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Schweblin and veteran translator McDowell trace the slim barrier between perception and reality with masterful narration, piercing dialogue, stealthy wit, and psychological precision. ... Outrageously original and deeply felt stories with an indelible effect." -Kirkus (starred review)

About the Author

SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN won the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her story collection Seven Empty Houses. Her debut novel, Fever Dream, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and her novel Little Eyes and story collection Mouthful of Birds have been longlisted for the same prize. Her books have been translated into more than forty languages, and her stories have appeared in English in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Buenos Aires, Schweblin lives in Berlin.

MEGAN MCDOWELL is the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been short- or longlisted four times for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile.