A Perfect Cemetery
"His stories shimmer like revelations - the clarity, mystery, beauty, depth, and sheer, thrilling peculiarity of ordinary life when the veil lifts. They're exhilarating to read, just as exhilarating to re-read." --Deborah Eisenberg
Childhood does not last long in the Argentine mountains of Córdoba, and adult lives fall apart quickly. In disarming, darkly humorous stories, Federico Falco explores themes of obsessive love, romantic attachment and the strategies we must find to cope with death and painful longing.
In the middle of a blizzard a widow watches the ruin of her late-husband's garden, until suddenly she sees a woman running naked in the falling snow. After telling her parents she is abandoning her Christian faith, a girl becomes infatuated with a Mormon missionary who reminds her of a boy killed in her village years before. When his family's home is lost, a father desperately offers his daughter's hand in marriage to anyone who will take them in. And a town's mayor tries to fulfill his father's dying wish - to design the perfect cemetery.
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Federico Falco (General Cabrera, Córdoba, Argentina, 1977) is an Argentinian writer and poet. He holds a BA in Communications from Blas Pascal University in Argentina and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. In 2004, he was given the Young Writers Award by the Spanish Cultural Centre of Córdoba, Argentina. In 2005, he received a grant for improvement from the National Trust for the Arts of Argentina, and in 2009, a scholarship from New York University and the Banco Santander Foundation. Granta selected him as one of The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010. The Plains is his most recent novel. In 2021 it won the Medifé Prize in Argentina and was the runner up for the Herralde Prize in Spain.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University and is a Presidential Professor at the University of Tulsa.
"The quiet assurance with which Falco addresses rural environments represents a departure recalling the perspectives of writers from the northern hemisphere such as Denis Johnson, Knut Hamsun or Tobias Wolff." --The Times Literary Supplement
"Expansive and ingeniously crafted--an unforgettable collection." --Kirkus, starred review
"Falco proves himself as a fine storyteller." --Publishers Weekly
"These rich and authentic portraits of Argentinian lives are well worth seeking out...You could imagine Alastair McLeod or John McGahern paying homage. (5 stars)" --RTÉ
"Moving, morbid, and humorous at the same time." --LA Review of Books
"Falco is a master of the short story."" --Martin MacInnes, author of INFINITE GROUND and GATHERING EVIDENCE
"His stories shimmer like revelations - the clarity, mystery, beauty, depth, and sheer, thrilling peculiarity of ordinary life when the veil lifts. They're exhilarating to read, just as exhilarating to re-read."" --Deborah Eisenberg, author of YOUR DUCK IS MY DUCK
"Each powerful story captivates and I cannot recommend this collection enough." --Morning Star
"When people praise Chekhov, stories like this are what they're thinking of." --James Crossley, Madison Books
"Croft's translations of the stories in A Perfect Cemetery are loyal to the profound beauty, rootedness, and longing they portray." --World Literature Today
"At long last, Argentine author Federico Falco finally has a full-length work in translation. A Perfect Cemetery is a 2016 collection of five stories, several of which are much longer than traditional short stories (thankfully so). With confident prose, storytelling verve, and remarkable consideration for both character and landscape, Falco writes impressively well. Though plights of fancy embroil each of Falco's characters, they are conveyed with a compassion and authenticity that make them seem utterly lifelike." --Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop
"Every word and sentence, including those of Croft's sincere and illuminating note that concludes the volume, should be savored, consumed in a rush only during those moments when you're flying down the summer streets with Silvi on her bicycle as she searches for the boy she believes she loves." --On the Seawall
"As so often in this compelling collection, the stories only open out once you finish them." --David's Book World
"The succinctness of the plotlines in these stories is inversely proportional to their vast narrative expanse, to everything the writing is able to carve out between the sharply curtailed dialogues and all that simmers underneath." --La Nación
"Perfectly honed... [Falco's] skill is apparent in the originality of these plots, the economy and naturalness of the characters' conversations, and in the meticulous observation of a gesture that may encapsulate whole central motifs" --Ñ Magazine
