The Dangers Of Smoking In Bed

Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize For Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

"Mariana Enriquez is a mesmerizing writer who demands to be read. Like Bolaño, she is interested in matters of life & death, & her fiction hits with the full force of a train."  -  Dave Eggers

Welcome to Buenos Aires, a city thrumming with murderous intentions & morbid desires, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. These brilliant, unsettling tales of revenge, witchcraft, fetishes, disappearances & urban madness spill over with women & girls whose dark inclinations will lead them over the edge.

Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, & with resounding tenderness towards those in pain, in fear, & in limbo, this new collection from one of Argentina's most exciting writers finds Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, & most chilling.

"Twelve gruesome, trenchant, & darkly winking stories set in modern-day Buenos Aires, Barcelona, & Belgium... Drawing on real places & events & spinning them out in fantastical ways, she disinters the darkness thrumming under the smooth, bureaucratized surface of urban life, exposing powerlessness, inequity, abuse, & erasure... Insidiously absorbing, like quicksand."  -  Kirkus Reviews

"Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers & dead children - those who are ordinarily powerless — who wield unholy power in this collection, & they seem uninterested in being reasonable. And Enriquez is particularly adept at capturing the single-minded intensity of teenage girls... To Enriquez, there’s pleasure in the perverse."  - Chelsea Leu, The New York Times Book Review