Fabio Morabito

A brilliant, unsettling collection of 18 stories about deception, translation, loneliness, and connection, from one of Mexico's greatest modern writers. Why is grass in airports so important? Can you be an extraordinary copyist without knowing how to read or write? Are there successful musicians who only play a single note in their life? Book after book, Fabio Mor bito's stories have become increasingly radical in their way of showing us that imagination is not a curious feature of the mind, but perhaps the only way to not feel excluded from the real world. With prose free of unnecessary explanation and descriptive embellishments, The Shadow of the Mammoth insists once again on the guiding principle of Mor bito's work: playing fair with the reader, who advances in reading these stories as he did when writing them, open to any direction they could take. For this reason, these stories are as unexpected as they are different from each other, all united by that pleasure of storytelling that has always been Mor bito's unmistakable hallmark.

Fabio Morábito is one of Mexico's best loved and most entertaining contemporary writers, his narratives marked by a humane irony and a philosophical resignation to the vagaries of his society and the irresistible tyrannies of time. Some of his poems make the reader laugh out loud, and Richard Gwyn's translations are true to the tone and manner of the originals. This is the first collection of his poems to appear in English, putting right a significant omission.The fifty-four poems in Invisible Dog were selected by the poet and translator in collaboration and draw from his five published collections spread over four decades. Readers enjoy a comprehensive introduction to his work in breadth and depth. His formal and thematic developments illuminate the wider context of modern Latin American writing, its inventive playfulness, its evasion of conventions of 'national culture'.Morábito was born to Italian parents in Alexandria in 1955 and has lived in Mexico City since the age of fifteen. His position as a poet writing in a second language contributes to his unique voice and vision. It is possible in these versions to detect elements of the poet's 'foreignness' in his straightforward lexical choices, which have the effect of making the poems somehow vulnerable, as in 'Journey to Pátzcuaro', a sort of allegory for the immigrant experience.

Drawing from everyday life in Mexico and abroad, these subtle, unsettling stories probe the boundaries between sanity and madness, life and death, safety and danger. The first story collection from prize-winning author Fabio Mor bito available in English, Mothers and Dogs features fifteen tales that show the emotional extremes in seemingly trivial details and quotidian situations: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn't been fed than they do about their dying mother; when the lights go out on a racetrack, a man's evening jog turns into a savage battle between runners; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother. As he deftly explores feelings of loneliness and despair endemic in modern society, Mor bito weaves threads of unexpected humor and lightness.

In this poignant novel, a man guilty of a minor offense finds purpose unexpectedly by way of his punishment--reading to others. After an accident--or "the misfortune," as his cancer-ridden father's caretaker, Celeste, calls it--Eduardo is sentenced to a year of community service reading to the elderly and disabled. Stripped of his driver's license and feeling impotent as he nears thirty-five, he leads a dull, lonely life, chatting occasionally with the waitresses of a local restaurant or walking the streets of Cuernavaca. Once a quiet town known for its lush gardens and swimming pools, the "City of Eternal Spring" is now plagued by robberies, kidnappings, and the other myriad forms of violence bred by drug trafficking. At first, Eduardo seems unable to connect. He movingly reads the words of Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, and more, but doesn't truly understand them. His eccentric listeners--including two brothers, one mute, who moves his lips while the other acts as ventriloquist; deaf parents raising children they don't know are hearing; and a beautiful, wheelchair-bound mezzo soprano--sense his detachment. Then Eduardo comes across a poem his father had copied by the Mexican poet Isabel Fraire, and it affects him as no literature has before. Through these fascinating characters, like the practical, quick-witted Celeste, who intuitively grasps poetry even though she never learned to read, Fabio Mor bito shows how art can help us rediscover meaning in a corrupt, unequal society.