The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories

Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize For Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

• “The lauded Argentine author of What We Lost in the Fire returns with enthralling stories conjured from literary sorcery” (O: The Oprah Magazine), in the tradition of Shirley Jackson & Jorge Luis Borges. 

KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST 

• ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, New York Public Library, Electric Lit, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews 

• “Mariana Enriquez’s stories are smoky, carnal, and dazzling.” — Lauren Groff, author of Matrix & Fates & Furies 

Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional & sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, & hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism & horror. 

The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, & press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard & into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. 

Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, & with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, & in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, & most chilling.

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Mariana Enriquez is a writer based in Buenos Aires. In English, she has published the novel Our Share of Night & two story collections, Things We Lost in the Fire & The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, & the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction.