About the Book

A collection of short stories by Peruvian American academic Margarita Saona.

Margarita Saona's sparse, clinically precise yet mysterious prose casts a spell upon her readers. Nothing says post-anthropocentric like Saona’s stories. Her characters, resisting gender and other labels inhabit cities that while existing in the real world, refuse to be pinned down on a map. In Saona’s stories, animals behave like humans, humans, like animals, or the elements, in a relentless phantasmagoria reminiscent of ancient mythology. This disembodiment is present in Saona’s narrative style, having herself hovered between life and death shortly before receiving a life-saving new heart. The English translation, The Ghost of You, originally titled in Spanish La ciudad donde no estás, gives these ghosts an English-speaking home, in the hopes they can remain in the memory of their readers the same way someone’s presence stills haunts a place.

Margarita Saona teaches Latin American literature and Culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was born in Peru and studied linguistics and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University in New York. She is interested in issues of memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. She has published books on literary and cultural criticism such as Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (London, 2014), and Despadre: Masculinidades, travestismos y ficciones de la ley en la literatura peruana. Her short fiction collections are Comehoras (Lima, 2008), Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012), and La ciudad en que no estás (Lima, 2020). She also has a book of poems, Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (Chicago, 2017) and an unpublished collection of poems entitled Precaria materia. She is currently working two books, a short essay entittled De monstruos y cyborgs and Corazón en trance, a memoir about her experience of heart transplantation.