Diving Board (Paperback)

“Opening Diving Board is like waking in a white room with no doors or windows. A question resonates as one reads these stories: How did Tomás Downey place me here so perfectly, and why is it that I don't want to leave?”—Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender is the Flesh and The Unworthy

Tomás Downey writes from the edge of the abyss. A little girl disappears midair; a horse grows from a seed; a war widow receives a visit of condolence, over and over and over again. In “The Astronaut” a man has become weightless, bobbing around on the ceiling, nauseated every time he is brought down and tethered to the earth. But the question here is not “how” or “why,” it’s “what happens next?” The astronaut wonders “Will I burn like an asteroid or drown in the void of space?” just as all of Downey’s stories reside in that threatening, destabilizing moment when all connection is lost. The world is filled with an ever-thickening mist, an old love haunts the living, making fruit rot in the bowl, and resolution isn’t offered or even sought—the human condition is queasy, fretful, absurd. All we can hope for is the leap into the unknown.

Tomás Downey is a translator, screenwriter, and the author of Acá el tiempo es otra cosa, El lugar donde mueren los pájaros, Flores que se abren de noche, and López López. His stories have been translated into Italian and English, and have appeared in magazines such as The Offing and The Common, and in the anthology Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories (Two Lines Press). He was born in 1984 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lives.

Sarah Moses is a writer and translator from Spanish and French. Her translations include Tender Is the Flesh and The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, and Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, among other awards. Her collection of short fiction, Strange Water, was published in the fall of 2024. Sarah lives in Buenos Aires and Toronto, where she’s from.