World's Best Mother
Katie Whittemore
(Translator)
Description
World's Best Mother adds a uniquely European perspective to the literary canon on motherhood. Perfect for readers of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, and Sheila Heti's Motherhood.
"A slyly funny and strikingly astute meditation on love in all its guises by a self-proclaimed 'amateur mother.'" --JENNY OFFILL, bestselling author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation
A thirty-five-year-old writer decides she wants to have children. Rounds of IVF treatments and several years later, she has two daughters and sits down to write this book. World's Best Mother is a sublime journey--through pregnancy, the mothering of small children, marriage, an affair--which unfolds in a heady mix of anecdote, imagination, and social commentary. Clever and insightful, the narrator examines the myth, but also the scam, of motherhood, openly dialoguing with voices of the past that in one way or another have fueled her condition as a woman: from the legendary hominid Lucy--"the mother of humanity"--to Cinderella, passing through Plato, Mother Teresa, Darwin, Maupassant, and Simone de Beauvoir along the way. Humor, love, and horror converge in this lively auto-fictional battle between the intensity of child rearing and the writer trying to fight her way out.
Product Details
| Publisher | World Editions |
| Publish Date | April 06, 2021 |
| Pages | 224 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781642860726 |
| Dimensions | 8.4 X 5.5 X 0.8 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
NURIA LABARI was born in Santander and is a writer and journalist. She has written for El Mundo, as well as Telecinco, where she was the editor in chief for web content. She is currently a frequent contributor to El País. Her short-story collection Los borrachos de mi vida ("The Drunkards in My Life") won the seventh Premio Narrativa de Caja de Madrid in 2009. In 2016 she published her first novel, Cosas que brillan cuando están rotas ("Things That Shine When Broken"). World's Best Mother is her latest work.
KATIE WHITTEMORE translates from the Spanish and lives in Valencia, Spain. She is the translator of Four by Four (Open Letter Books, 2020) by Sara Mesa, and her work has appeared in Two Lines, The Arkansas International, The Common Online, Gulf Coast Magazine Online, The Brooklyn Rail, and InTranslation. Current projects include novels by Spanish authors Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, and Aliocha Coll (for Open Letter Books), and Aroa Moreno Durán (for Tinder Press).
Reviews
Praise for World's Best Mother
"A slyly funny and strikingly astute meditation on love in all its guises by a self-proclaimed 'amateur mother.'" --JENNY OFFILL, bestselling author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation
"In World's Best Mother, Nuria Labari has summoned all of the vitality and tenderness of women who have come before and those who will come after. Rage and desire and love and insolence--she's laid it at our feet with a wry smile, unapologetic. It is fearless, profound and destabilizing, in the way the best literature is." --MEAGHAN O'CONNELL, author of And Now We Have Everything
"An honest, deep, and visceral reflection on being a mother." --PILAR QUINTANA, author of National Book Award finalist The Bitch
"Labari's searing, insightful voice lights up the landscape of reproductive biology, culture, and history, giving us new ways to think about creativity itself. A brilliant, vital, necessary contribution to the canon." --ELISA ALBERT, author of After Birth
"Sure, Nuria Labari's book is about being a mother, but as is indicated in the subtitle, it's about so much more. About womanhood, creativity, the joys and travails of married life, the way love changes over time. Basically, about the difficulties of being in today's world. It would be a mistake to think that this is a book just for moms though. It's a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human. Labari's voice--thanks to Katie Whittemore's sharp, lively translation--is absolutely riveting for its earnestness. Being a creative, perceptive mother is messy business, but Labari never shies away from that messiness, transforming this memoir into a work of art."--CHAD POST, Open Letter Books
"Labari writes with candor." --Kirkus Reviews
"A sincere, revealing and visceral chronicle of motherhood."--El País
"Prepare to read a book like you've never read before, one that breaks the bounds of the narrative and the biographical, the conventions of both traditional and alternative values. A book of humor, love, and pain; as intoxicating as strong wine and as tumultuous as life. The truth is that I can't imagine the possibility of someone not liking it." --Rosa Montero
"A story told from the edge of a knife, a fictionalized chronicle that investigates pain and darkness, but also love, solidarity, and hope." --TodoLiteratura
"In clean, quick, and pointed prose that gets into the reader's soul from the start, Labari's novel leaves space for reflections on pain and makes room for understanding and coming to the aid of the fragile, incidental individual in today's society." --El Confidencial
"Nuria sheds a light on this chaos of darkness that I inhabit when I think about my motherhood (or non-motherhood)." --Paula Bonet
"Nuria Labari shows that living motherhood and writing about it is the new punk. A book against social conventions and against the predictable." --Sergio Del Molino
"There are many ways to talk about motherhood, but Nuria Labari's book is profoundly original and brilliant. This novel is an explosion, an intellectual journey through the most primary instincts and the most human love. Nuria Labari has written a necessary book on a universal theme." --Lara Moreno
"Labari infuses this story with some of her own experience, going beyond the life of a protagonist who lifts the veil on stereotypes and turning this text into a universal story about motherhood loaded with humanity, doubts, humor, regrets and imperfections." --El Diario
"This novel joins the debate already opened by public figures such as Samanta Villar: the ambivalence generated by motherhood in contemporary female identity." --Anabel Palomares
"For Labari, the important thing is to take the issue of motherhood to the streets and to books, to take away that sense of duty to be maternal that floods us and infiltrates our way of living sex." --Paola Aragón, Fashion & Arts
"Nuria Labari's book must be read slowly, with a pencil, underlining. And, at the end of each chapter, get up, walk, think. It is both a necessary and insufficient book: we need more women, we need more mothers, more non-mothers, more workers, more artists, more grandmothers, more cleaners, more executives, more single mothers...We need more voices. That said: how well you think and what a pleasure to read you, Labari. Somebody take care of those girls for a while, please. Let Nuria keep writing." --Paloma Bravo
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