Siete casas vacías
Samanta Schweblin

In Spanish
Páginas de espuma

There are seven houses, and they are empty. The narrator, according to Rodrigo Fresán, is "a sane scientist contemplating madmen, or people who are seriously considering going mad." And sanity, as always, is superficial. Samanta Schweblin draws us into Seven Empty Houses and, around them, pushes her characters to explore everyday terrors, to dissect their own and others' fears, and to expose the prejudices of those who, between estrangement and a rarefied "normality," contemplate others and themselves. Schweblin's sharp and precise prose, her ability to create intense and claustrophobic atmospheres, and the disturbing range of sensations that run through her seven stories have made this book worthy of the IV International Short Fiction Prize Ribera del Duero. The jury, which included the writers Pilar Adón, Jon Bilbao, Guadalupe Nettel, Andrés Neuman and was presided over by Rodrigo Fresán, valued in Siete casas vacías the precision of its style, the investigation into the strangeness and the perverse local color that inhabits its enveloping and dazzling stories.