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About Cockfight
Product Description Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero. In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas. Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it. Review “Ampuero leads the international wave of Ecuadorian writers.” —New York Times en Español “Ampuero writes with steely nerves and an ear for the beauty of simple, concrete language.” —Kirkus Reviews “Ampuero’s literary voice is tough and beautiful at once: her stories are exquisite and dangerous objects.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World “Brutal! Very intense.” —Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire "María Fernanda Ampuero’s voice is urgent, intimate, lyrical while never forgetting to cast humor during the darkest of violent moments. This is a writer of great power that the entire Americas will have to deal with for decades to come.” —Ernesto Quiñonez, author of Bodega Dreams "The stories in Ampuero’s Cockfight vibrate with a singular voice, building a fictional universe dominated by violence and explorations of both power dynamics and exploitation. Ampuero’s brutal and animalistic prose haunted me. I can’t stop thinking about this book." —Cristina Rodriguez, Deep Vellum Books About the Author María Fernanda Ampuero is a writer and journalist, born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 1976. She has published articles in newspapers and magazines around the world, as well as two nonfiction books: Lo que aprendí en la peluquería y Permiso de residencia. Cockfight is her first short story collection, and her first book to be translated into English. Frances Riddle is a writer and translator based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her recent book-length translations include Not One Less by María Pía López (forthcoming, Polity Press); Plebeian Prose by Néstor Perlongher (Polity Press 2019); The German Room by Carla Maliandi (Charco Press 2018). Her short story translations, essays, and reviews have been published in the White Review, Electric Literature, the Short Story Project, and Words Without Borders, among others. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Monsters Narcisa always said we should be more afraid of the living than the dead, but we didn’t believe her because in all the horror movies the people we were afraid of were the dead, the ones that had returned from beyond, the possessed. Mercedes was terrified of demons and I was terrified of vampires. We talked about it all the time. About satanic possessions and about men with fangs that fed on the blood of little girls. Papa and Mama bought us dolls and fairy tale stories and we recreated The Exorcist with the dolls and made believe that prince charming was really a vampire who woke Snow White up to turn her into an undead. During the day everything was fine, we were brave, but at night we asked Narcisa to come upstairs with us. Papa didn’t like for Narcisa—he called her the help—to sleep in our room, but it was inevitable: we said that if she didn’t come up we’d go down to sleep with the help in her room. That terrified her. And so Narcisa, who must’ve been about fourteen years old, pretended to protest, saying that she didn’t want to sleep with us, that we should be more afraid of the living than the dead. And we thought it was ridiculous because how could anyone be more afraid, for example, of Narcisa than of Reagan, the girl from The Exorcist or more afraid of Don Pepe, the gar
