Visceral

A raw personal essay collection by the internationally known author of Cockfight and Human Sacrifices on the terror of being in a female body in a misogynistic world.

What does it mean to move with a woman’s body through a misogynistic world? María Fernanda Ampuero, one of the greatest writers of the new wave of Latin American gothic fiction, answers this question in this personal essay collection that’s part analysis, part confessional, and part horror story.

Through vivid personal details—witnessing a COVID corpse shaded by a colorful parasol on a park bench, remembering a disintegrating relationship through a letter to a stuffed mouse, slowly realizing she is being abducted by a Tinder hookup, imagining herself a barbarian on the streets of Madrid—and with surreal dark humor, Ampuero traces her memories of colonizers and exiles, parents and childlessness, lockdown relationships and lost innocence, fatphobia, mental illness, and writing as a practice for surviving all of it. What emerges is one woman’s account of what it means to live in a human body—oppressed, ailing, and outraged—told as only Ampuero can.