What To Read

Tertulia's First Dibs Editors Salon series is an exclusive look at a few of the most exciting books coming out each season. On September 17 at 7:30pm, join us on Zoom for what promises to be a great conversation about books with the editors who helped to shape and publish them.

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One of the fall selections is A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez, which is a fantastical and frightening collection of stories, featuring a host of macabre creatures set in the author's native Argentina. We are honored to have the book's editor, David Ebershoff, join us at the salon on September 17 to talk about the book. He shared this personal note about the book as a special preview just for Tertulia readers.

David Ebershoff is Vice President & Editor in Chief of Hogarth, an imprint of Random House.

A couple of years ago, over dinner in Los Angeles, Mariana Enriquez told me the story of a middle-class neighborhood up in arms about a recent influx of ghosts. The way she told the story in intimate, slightly bemused detail, it was like listening to a familiar tale of suburban, NIMBY angst, except the nuisance encroaching on the community was supernatural. Of course I was riveted. And that’s what reading A Sunny Place for Shady People is like—sitting across from a masterful storyteller as she intimately spins her tales of mostly ordinary people encountering the inexplicable.

Mariana’s characters are familiar to us, even as their circumstances are anything but. In eerie and sublime manner, she uses the tools and tropes of horror and fantasy to investigate several personal themes and ideas, including the emotional lives of women and girls; injustice and inequality, especially gender-based; the dark, often violent political history of her native Argentina; and how the ugly is sometimes beautiful, and vice versa.

Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People shows why Mariana Enriquez has quickly become one of the most exciting and influential voices in world literature—and why so many of us have fallen under her spell.