Nominated for the Edinburgh Book Festival First Book Award 2017
One of Publishers Weekly's "10 Essential 21st-Century Spanish-Language Books"
An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection
Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016"
A Foreword Reviews Reviewers' Choice Selection for "14 Favorites of 2016"
"A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." — Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop
"A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." — Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel
“Funny and frightening, a swift meditation on vision, memory, the human soul itself. Very cinematic in its execution, bold in its content, Seeing Red ultimately forces us to give good thought to the great wonder and blessing that is a properly functioning body.” ― On Art & Aesthetics
This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships.
Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.
Lina Meruane is one of the most prominent female voices in Chilean contemporary narrative. A novelist, essayist, and cultural journalist, she is the author of a host of short stories appeared in various anthologies and magazines in Spanish, English, German and French. She has also published a collection of short stories, Las Infantas (Chile 1998, Argentina 2010),as well as three novels, Póstuma (Chile 2000, Portugal 2001), Cercada (Chile 2000) and Fruta Podrida (Chile & México 2007). The latter won the Best Unpublished Novel Priza awarded by Chile´s National Council of the Culture and the Arts in 2006. She is the winner of the Anna Seghers Prize, awarded to her by the Akademie der Künste, in Berlin, Germany, 2011. Meruane received the prestigious Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2012 with the publication of her most recent novel, Sangre en el ojo (Seeing Red).
Meruane has received writing grants from the Arts Development Fund of Chile (1997), the Guggenheim Foundation (2004) and National Endowment for the Arts (2010). Meruane is a cultural journalist, columnist and stringer for written media, and currently serves as editor of Brutas Editoras, an independent publishing house located in New York City. Holder of a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from New York University, Meruane currently teaches World and Latin American Literature and Creative Writing at NYU.
Megan McDowell is a literary translator of many modern and contemporary South American authors, including Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Busqued, Álvaro Bisama, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, Mandorla, and Vice, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile and New York.
