Heather Cleary

Coming soon:

Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (Deep Vellum) // fiction — 2023

Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías (Scribe) // fiction — 2023

FICTION

Witches by Brenda Lozano
(MacLehose (UK), May 2022 / Catapult, August 2022)

* TIME best book of the month
* Notable Literary Fiction for Fall @ Publishers Weekly
* Most Anticipated Book of the Year @ NYLON
* 10 Best LGBTQ+ Books to Read This Summer @ THEM
* Great Beach Reads for Pride Month @ CBS NEWS

“The book is beautifully translated . . . Though [it] chronicles violence against women and those who present as women, it highlights, in both rural and urban communities, an atmosphere of freedom and mobility that is a pleasure to read about. Both of these very different women — the curandera and the journalist — have many people in their lives, especially sisters, who heal and support them even in a hostile world.” —Rachel Nolan, The New York Times

“Feliciana’s sections are looping and abstract, while Zoe’s are as clipped and sharp as any journalist’s writing would be. The contrast between them is irresistible . . . Lozano writes their stories, and their growing connection, with such warmth that often reading Witches feels like sneaking into Feliciana’s house with Zoe. By the end, the novel feels like a community.” —Lily Meyer, NPR

“Lozano does a wonderful job distinguishing the disparate characters and their fluid identities, and Cleary’s translation strikes the perfect balance of immersion and clarity. Powerful and complex, this marks a new turn from an intriguing writer.” —Publishers Weekly

“Readers of Fernanda Melchor’s form-busting, psychedelic takes on recent South American history won’t want to miss Brenda Lozano’s Witches . . . Heather Cleary fluidly translates Lozano’s spiky narrative, immersing readers in its horrors without obscuring its beauties.” —Chicago Review of Books

“In this gem of a book, Lozano demonstrates a poet’s ear for language and a fine attunement to how voice builds character. Taking inspiration from Mexico’s quintessential oral poet, healer María Sabina, the zigzagging narratives of its protagonists remind us that psychedelia found its origin in the revelation that buffs the mind clean. Cleary’s inspired translation partakes of the same vital spirit.” —Mónica de la Torre, author of The Happy End / All Welcome

“Braiding together the voices of two women—a mystic and a skeptic—Witches, to borrow Brenda Lozano’s words by way of Heather Cleary’s translation, runs into shadows to bring light. This is a story of the world’s repeated failure to control feminine power and the sheer magic of language itself. An enthralling, passionate story about secrets both holy and profane.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Nobody is Ever Missing

“A terrific read from a writer who explores the power of the feminine in a world set on narrowly defining and belittling it.” —Sarah Neilson, Them

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Variations on the Body by María Ospina
(Coffee House Press, July 2021)

* Chicago Review of Books, “12 Must-Read Books for July” 
* The Rumpus, “What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Women’s History”
* Book Riot, “Must-Read Books in Translation”
* Literary Hub,“The Best of Independent Presses this July”

“Somatic upsets express the psychic fallout of violent conflict in Colombia, where women wrestle with how to steer a life. . . . Cleary, a National Book Award nominee for her translation of Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre, preserves the muted suggestiveness of Ospina’s prose.” —Tracy O’Neill, The New York Times

“In Ospina’s smart, vibrant debut collection, women struggle to carve out lives for themselves. . . . Ospina draws out the class distinctions among her characters with stark, incisive contrasts.” —Publishers Weekly

“Bold and penetrating.” —Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“Short stories fans in search of a new obsession, look no further. . . . Weaving together a complex interconnected portrait of girls and women in Bogotá, Colombia, this crystalline translation from Heather Cleary has an offbeat sensibility reminiscent of Joy Williams, where the potential for inexplicable violence exists alongside the mundane.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Some women attempt to control their own narratives by way of controlling their bodies . . . while others are intrigued to the point of obsession by the narratives and bodies of others. Men exist on the periphery, but these are women-led and women-focused stories. . . . Ospina manages to address themes of control, intrastate conflict, and women’s bodies while keeping her reader inside the story.” —Zoe Goldstein, World Literature Today

“Creates striking parallels throughout. . . . Variations on The Body is interested in how a body is edited and modified to be presented to others.” —Sarah McEachern, The Rupture

“Debut story collections don’t come any finer than María Ospina’s Variations on the Body. […] Ospina writes with poise, profundity, and enviable emotional intelligence.” —Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

“Throughout these stories, women take care of other women, women resist or succumb to the violence and demands of society, and women contemplate the beautiful. . . . Not a catalog of all the ways a female body is blatantly battered by society, but rather a gentle and nuanced exploration of female physical existence in Bogotá.” —Brittany Cole, Slanted Spines

“María Ospina has created an artifact that’s both luminous and dark, tender and cruel, whose inhabitants move in a shared space sculpted by violence. Within these pages, there shines a fine and beautiful diamond of sharp, fearsome faces.” —Carmen Boullosa

“Ospina is a remarkable talent, and Heather Cleary, an extraordinary translator. I love the offbeat, flea-bitten reality Variations on the Body captures: Marxist guerillas, stray dogs, dolls, vivid dreams. It’s as if Ospina has cut beautiful, odd scraps from our world using her own unique writer-made scissors.” —Camilla Grudova

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American Delirium by Betina González
(Henry Holt, Feb 2021)

* * Books We Love (2021) @ NPR * *
* * 2021 Most Anticipated @ The New York Times * *
* * February’s Most Anticipated @ The Millions * *
* * 16 Best Books to Read in February @ Kirkus * *
* * 10 Latine-Authored Books for Your 2021 Reading List @ Remezcla * *
* * 10 Debut Books to Read this February @ Debutiful * *
* * Book of the Week, Feb 15 @ Publishers Weekly * *
* * February Reads For the Rest of Us @ Ms. * *
* * Best Reviewed Books of the Week @ BookMarks * *

Reviews:

Starred review, Publishers Weekly
“González’s distorted utopian vision is a memorable trip.”

Starred review, Kirkus
“An uncategorizable novel that manages to be both zany and profound.”

Anderson Tepper for The New York Times
“González manages to merge the stories of Berenice, Vik and Beryl — gradually revealed in alternating sections — into one dizzying vortex, combining colonial history, generational delusions and psychedelic drug trips. Fluidly translated by Cleary, the novel offers an eerily familiar vision of American madness and decay — from an Argentine writer, no less.”

Andrienne Cruz, starred review for Booklist
An “unsettling yet erudite…social commentary on capitalism and the progressive mentality replete with astute observations on aging, death, and human nature.”

Max Winter for The Boston Globe
“[U]nsettling, fantastical, and often hilarious…consistently riveting…When we do finally reach a conclusion, we feel less like we have been reading a novel than like we have been listening to a symphony.” // “The best and most memorable translations give the sense that the translator has literally occupied the writer’s brain. This was one of those. To call it limber is an understatement; we can practically hear a prim but also deranged voice speaking to us, like Steven Millhauser on hallucinogens.”

Lauren Bufferd for BookPage
“The lively pace and absurdity of American Delirium could easily go off the rails, but González keeps a tight control over each of her characters even as they navigate their ever-stranger adventures. The novel is well served by translator Heather Cleary’s light touch, which allows for a certain amount of zaniness without sacrificing the plot or the well-defined characters.”

Erin Berger for Outside
“The novel is fast-paced, but González is fastidious in tying together every character and almost-missable detail by the end. It manages to be an ode to taxidermy and botany, a meditation on aging, a tongue-in-cheek look at how we romanticize the wilderness, and, as the title suggests, a reflection on the delusions of modern life.”

“Betina González writes with tremendous verve. What a sharp, audacious novel about the escalating delirium of our current era. Heather Cleary’s translation recreates the quicksilver scenes of American Delirium with superb artistry.”
—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“This is a beautiful and ruthless novel that asks readers to dive into it with their whole selves, to see themselves in its violence and its flickers of hope. It is, like few are, a book that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it.”
— Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

Events and interviews:

Interview @ Debutiful
Interview @ Southwest Review
Book presentation with Carlos Fonseca @ McNally Jackson (video)
Book presentation with Idra Novey @ Politics and Prose (video)

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Mrs. Murakami’s Garden by Mario Bellatin
(Deep Vellum/Phoneme, Dec 2020)

Kirkus
“Bellatin is a playful novelist who isn’t trying to hold the mirror to reality, provide allegory or philosophy or life lessons, and reading this provocative novella makes one consider all sorts of assumptions about why read? and why write?“

World Literature Today
“An homage veering on pastiche of great modern Japanese writers such as Junichiro Tanizaki (whose book on aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, plays a minor but important role) or Fumiko Enchi—translator Heather Cleary does an excellent job of producing their slightly rarefied tone”

The Modern Novel
“If like me, you like a bit of mystery, uncertainty and attempts by the author to throw the reader off track of what is going on, then you will find this a superb work. It is relatively short, but Bellatin packs a lot in.”

Books & Books
“As Mr. Murakami’s garden is demolished, so too is the narrative’s authenticity, leaving the reader to wonder: did this book’s creator exist at all? Mario Bellatin has revolutionized the state of Latin American literature with his experimental, shocking novels. With this brand-new, highly anticipated edition of Mrs. Murakami’s Garden from lauded translator Heather Cleary, readers have access to a playful modern classic that transcends reality.”

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The Incompletes by Sergio Chejfec
(Open Letter Books 2019)

* Finalist, CLMP Firecracker Award

Read an excerpt at Latin American Literature Today

Kirkus
“What is the responsibility of the storyteller to adhere to the facts as told? Is it possible to ever completely know what happened? If the story is vivid and engaging—as this book is—does it matter? In this innovative novel, Chejfec is gesturing toward the grand European traditions on his own terms.”

Publishers Weekly
“An intensely ruminative travelogue.”

NPR
“In the end you’ll stumble out of the book, a bit dazed, wondering what the hell you just read, but it’s an enjoyable trek if you like beautiful sentences.”

On the Seawall
“The most literary of his novels, it openly plays with the concepts of perception, projection, and characterization.”

4Columns
“Another reminder of how deeply Chejfec is thinking about the form of the novel, pushing its boundaries to let modern varieties of social malaise leak in, and thereby renewing the novel’s ability to reflect—and affect—our lives.”

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Comemadre by Roque Larraquy
(Coffee House Press 2018)

* Nominated for a National Book Award for Translated Literature
* Nominated for a Best Translated Book Award (BTBA)
* Nominated for a National Translation Award (NTA)
* Nominated for an International Dublin Literary Award

Year-end round-ups: Best Fiction of 2018
*  Huffington Post
* Publishers Weekly
* Entropy Magazine
* LitHub’s Ultimate Best Books of 2018 List
* Vol.1 Brooklyn

* One of World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2018
* Publishers Weekly Best Books We Read in 2018 (any pub. date)

… Starred Publishers Weekly Review (plus an early note here)
“Shuttling between B-movie horror and exceedingly dark comedy, the novel is somehow both genuinely scary and genuinely funny, sometimes on the same page—a wickedly entertaining ride.”

… an interview with Roque Larraquy at The Believer
“Comemadre is a book about liminality, the spaces and connective tissues between things, and the transformations that take place in transit from one world to another, whether they are the taxonomic kingdoms of art and science, or life and death.”

… LitHub’s 10 Books You Should Read This July
“When the world is weird and maddening and warped, I turn to books that are even more so. I’m particularly excited to read Comemadre by Roque Larraquy. Like most stories, it is about love and life but I’ve also been promised mysterious ants, missing body parts, and flesh-eating plants.”

… Los Angeles Review of Books
“Part of the horrifying joy of this novel is how safely you can rest in the hands of a maniac as the narrative world is built and burned down around you.”

… Arkansas International Review
“A strange waking dream from which there is no escape.”

… Publishers Weekly: 10 Writers to Watch
(A short profile including statements from the author and translator)

… Brazos Bookstore, Brazos Best (July)
“By turns strange & comic, beautiful & violent, a story with a foot in two different centuries, Comemadre is the debut of an original voice … A novel that entertains with its gallows humor and shocking obsession with art and mortality. One of the best books I’ve read this year.”

… The Millions: Most Anticipated
“In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we’re confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition.”

… Asymptote: New in Translation July 2018
“Deeply unsettling and beautiful … The language, which Cleary does a remarkable job transforming into English, draws the reader into the story, making him or her complicit in the horror through his or her spectatorship. The consumption of this novel is quick, but the text will inevitably continue to haunt its reader.”

… Reviewed at Full Stop
“By tempering even the darkest of moments of the story with grand metaphors, scathing interiority, and the comically absurd, Larraquy pulls the rug out from under the reader’s despair, humanizing the seemingly inhuman cruelty of its characters. It’s essential that the story feels empathetic and relatable if Larraquy is to effectively raise questions of cruelty, alienation, and guilt.”

… Reviewed at The Cleaver
“Roque Larraquy is a strong monologist. … As for the translation by Heather Cleary, it is hard to imagine Comemadre functioning as effectively as it does without her. ”

… A very cool visual review over at The Rumpus

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Don’t Send Flowers by Martín Solares
(Black Cat / Grove Press 2018)

* Named one of the Best Mysteries of 2018 by The Wall Street Journal

… Publishers Weekly Review
“An excellent, frightening portrayal of the breadth and depth of Mexico’s cartel violence and systemic corruption.”

… Kirkus Review
“Crime novels don’t get much grittier.”

… Starred Review at Booklist
“A powerful, kaleidoscopic tale set in a society where there is no center to hold … another urgent and vital work from a writer to watch.”

… Wall Street Journal
“Extraordinary … Without losing sight of its central narrative, the book on occasion ascends into the realm of surrealism and the fever dream.”

… Nudge
“Any noir fan will feel at home with this novel immediately; gritty and vicious but so real it’s scary … The writing is cool, even lyrical, the dialogue is a hard-boiled joy … A pacy, sharp-witted thriller that will stay with you for a long time.”

… Shelf Awareness
“Throughout the book’s bold narrative choices, Solares maintains a deft touch for suspense. [His] most frightening ability of all, though, is to give even monstrous characters understandable motivations.”

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The Dark by Sergio Chejfec
(Open Letter Books 2013)

* Nominee, National Translation Award

The Planets by Sergio Chejfec
(Open Letter Books 2012)

* Finalist, Best Translated Book Award

POETRY

Poems to Read on a Streetcar by Oliverio Girondo
(New Directions 2014)

Recipient, Programa SUR Translation Grant
Recipient, PEN Translation Fund Grant

“A book should be made like a watch and sold like a sausage.”
—Oliverio Girondo

… something like a preface via ndbooks.com
… comments on goodreads.com

Cosmological Me by Luis Correa Díaz
(El fin de la noche 2009)

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NON-FICTION

Ikigai by Frances Miralles and Héctor García
(Penguin Random House 2017)

… Publishers Weekly Review

… New York Post

… The Times (UK)

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Sociophobia by César Rendueles
(Columbia University Press 2017)

“Sociophobia is already a landmark book in the Spanish-language world. With his contrarian perspective on the emancipatory capability of social networks, copyleft, and other forms of activism in the digital era, Rendueles will have a major impact on global debates about technology and postcapitalism.”

—Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis

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Works in other volumes (selected):

“The Smile” by Dahlia de la Cerda (with Julia Sanches) (Astra Magazine 2022)

“Liliana Porter: Reality, Representation, and Problematizing Scale” by Brenda Lozano (Frieze 2018)

“A Trip to the Cemetery” by Sergio Chejfec (Words Without Borders 2018)

“Love is a Natural Disaster” by Betina González (The Literary Review – TLR – 2017)

“My Country, O My Country” by Efraín Huerta and “Ancestors” by Guadalupe Nettel (Village Voice 2016)

“Torres-García’s Other Workshop” by Sergio Chejfec (MoMA Publications 2015)

“Interiors” by Andrea Maturana (A Public Space 2015)
* Named “Story of the Week” by Ploughshares

Excerpt from Florencia Werchowsky’s No-Tell Motel (Two Lines 2015)

“Banbury Road” by Liliana Colanzi (Michigan Quarterly Review 2015)

“Four Stories by Pablo Katchadjian” (Make Magazine 2015)

Fiction by Abilio Estévez, Evelio Rosero, and José María Merino for A Thousand Forests in One Acorn (Open Letter 2014)

“Nocturnes” by Oliverio Girondo (Stonecutter 2014)

Fiction and essays by Liliana Colanzi, Giovanna Rivero, and others (Review, the magazine of the Americas Society, 2013-present)

Excerpt from Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark (The Coffin Factory 2012)

Interviews with Carlos Fuentes, Chavela Vargas, Jorge Volpi, and others, for Revealing Mexico (Melcher / PowerHouse Books 2010)

“Tropes” and “Requiem in Living White” by Oliverio Girondo (Two Lines 2010)