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.

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.