Include Me Out - by María Sonia Cristoff (Paperback)

About the Book

"Mara is a simultaneous interpreter who moves to a provincial town in Argentina in order to speak as little as possible for a year. Steeled with the ten rules of silence set out in her manual of rhetoric, she takes a job as a guard in the local museum. The advantages of her work are threatened when she's asked to assist in the re-embalming of the museum's pride and joy: two horses--of great national and historical significance--are disintegrating and must be saved. But her goal and her slippery grasp on sanity lead her to more anarchistic means to bolster her purpose"--

Book Synopsis

An interpreter takes a vow of silence in order to re-define the terms on which she lives.

Review Quotes

"An innovative, genre-bending exploration of women's agency and the power of silence."--Foreword Reviews

"A striking, clever novel . . . [on the] meaninglessness of words and the meanings of silence."--Publishers Weekly

Praise for False Calm:

"A bold, beautiful book."--The New York Times

"A marvelous chronicle."--Publishers Weekly

"False Calm bears little relation to most travelogues . . . It's not exploration; it's portraiture."--NPR

"False Calm is fascinating, informative, and ultimately a pleasure to read."--World Literature Today

"Style is perfectly suited to subject; Cristoff travels in a land where real meets surreal and curses, superstition, myth, and mysticism are woven into the fabric of everyday life."--Kirkus Reviews

"Personal memoir, travelogue, and history combine in María Sonia Cristoff's False Calm, a journey that peels back the layers of the ghostly fog blanketing Patagonia to reveal engrossing complexity."--Foreword Reviews

"Cristoff is far from being just another writer. She is, on the contrary, a magnificent example of a chronicler-essayist narrator: a unique species of those who are possibly on the way to extinction."--Alejandra Costamagna

"Outstanding, fun, insightful."--Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"A brilliant journalistic investigation."--Denis Scheck, ARD Tagesthemen

"Captivating, intelligent, where the silent strength reaches beyond the real at hand."--Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"A marvelous book with literary reportage, possibly one of the best books to come of the hundreds of new translations from Argentinean literature."--Süddeutsche Zeitung

"Impressive literary quality. A profoundly disquieting image of the Argentinean Patagonia and beyond."--Monika Thees, Die Berliner Literaturkritik

About the Author

María Sonia Cristoff (Trelew, Patagonia, 1965) is the author of five works of fiction and nonfiction, including False Calm: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia and Include Me Out, and lives in Buenos Aires, where she teaches creative writing. Her work has been translated into six languages.