Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez, and Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro: two new translated books from Charco Press that are quirky, poignant, and very relevant for our times.
Extract: "As much as the book speaks of an unbridgeable existential gap that stands between two humans, it is also about the awful outcomes when certain boundaries are disregarded: denying another person agency over their own body and their life choices, and condemning them, as by illness, to a life antithetical to their being. How can a person make a decision for another? Do we know what weight existence holds, unless we personally experience the worst? Do we know what weight our body holds, until it stops working the way we expect it?"
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