Rabbit Island

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

These eleven stories from one of Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists" combine gritty surrealism with explosive interior meditations, traversing the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called "non-inventor" brings snow-white rabbits to an island inhabited exclusively by birds, with horrific results. In "Myotragus" a privileged man's understanding of the world is violently disrupted by the sight of a creature long thought extinct. Elsewhere in these stories that map dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards, an unsightly "paw" grows from a writer's earlobe and a grandmother floats silently in the corner of the room.