Cars on Fire

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Ríos’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of female characters―the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student―whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic, Rios offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile’s La Zona Central, the stories in Cars on Fire offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces―xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world―that shape life in Chile and the United States.

Mónica Ramón Ríos was born in Santiago de Chile. She is the author of the novel Segundos (2010) and the twin novels Alias el Rucio and Alias el Rocío (2014-2015). As a scholar, she has written extensively on Latin American literature and film. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and journals such as Anomaly, Granta [Spain], Asymptote, Alba, and Buensalvaje. Ríos is also one of the creators of Sangría Editora, a publishing collective based in Santiago and New York.

Robin Myers was born in New York and is based in Mexico City. She is the author of several collections of poetry published as bilingual editions in Mexico, Argentina, and Spain. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing, Inventory, and elsewhere. In 2009, she was a fellow of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA); in 2014, she was a resident translator at the Banff Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). Her translation of Ezequiel Zaidenwerg’s Lyric Poetry Is Dead was published by Cardboard House Press in 2018.