The Week of Colors - by Elena Garro (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Short stories from the "cursed mother of magical realism" (El Mundo), now in English for the first time

A woman flits between two realities centuries apart, as scenes from the violent conquest of Mexico bleed their way into her comfortable contemporary life. Two little girls visit the home of a sorcerer who tortures women named after the days of the week. Girls become dogs, a laborer hides human bones in bricks he'll use to build a new development, and an old woman appears at an acquaintance's door one night with a knife and a bone-chilling confession.

With The Week of Colors, Elena Garro laid the groundwork for the literary movements that would shape the landscape of Latin American fiction and beyond. Here you'll find the early roots of magical realism, feminist horror, and anticolonial speculative fiction. In The Week of Colors, Garro highlights the violence in our history, our homes, and our hearts, in vivid color.

Review Quotes

"Elena Garro is the Tolstoy of Mexico." --Jorge Luis Borges

"Powerful. Dark. Complex. Books with a basement vault, or a fracture, or both. Nothing is what it seems with Garro; or else everything is something else."--Cristina Rivera Garza, Cuadrivio

"A brilliant woman of fierce courage." --Samanta Schweblin, Revista Anfibia

"I think she's a brilliant writer, one of those writers who come along once in a hundred years. I think she's the greatest novelist of the 20th century."--César Aira, Letras libres

"Elena Garro: the cursed mother of magical realism."--El Mundo

"Elena is a myth, an icon, a one-of-a-kind woman with enormous talent."--Elena Poniatowska