Blood Red
Blood Red
By Gabriela Ponce
Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker
Longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize
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The exhilarating English-language debut from celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red centers the female body in a radical exploration of desire, pleasure, and pain.
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632063304
Publication date: Oct 4, 2022
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About the Book
In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations—until its abrupt absence changes everything.
Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray—or red—zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one’s body, Blood Red revels in the narrator’s autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.
PRAISE FOR BLOOD RED
“Ponce brings striking candor to the narrator’s ambivalence as she undergoes a series of emotional transformations, and Booker expertly captures the rhythm and velocity of Ponce’s prose, which skims along the surface before plunging into startling depths… Ponce packs a powerful punch.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Vivid and hallucinatory, Blood Red, is an explosive novel. Ponce tackles marriage, drugs, pregnancy and the beauty and anxiety of the female body with poetic urgency. In visceral prose, from Ecuador to Spain, Blood Red takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the troubled human heart. A brilliant novel by a visionary writer."
—Mark Haber, author of Saint Sebastian's Abyss
“This book is savage. Ponce’s prose is full of passion, that is, full of desire and pain. That’s why it feels so alive, like a bleeding heart pumping inside your head.”
—Mónica Ojeda, author of Jawbone
“In this English-language debut, as translated by Booker, Ponce’s prose is rich and atmospheric, and almost every scene operates on multiple emotional layers … this makes the narrator fully palpable despite the omission of certain biographical details. Ponce masterfully shows how despair and desire collide within one person, creating an entire universe of deeply felt emotional consequences…Dark, beautiful, and a little disturbing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Now available in English, this sharp and singular stream of consciousness story of one woman’s experiences of divorce, embodiment, love, womanhood, power and freedom. Wicked in all the best ways.”
—Karla J Strand, Ms. Magazine
“A raw, stream-of-consciousness novel that feels like putting Viriginia Woolf and Ottessa Moshfegh in a blender. The exhilarating English-language debut from celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red centers the female body in a radical exploration of desire, choice, and consequences.”
“This is a book you can almost smell and taste: so vivid and visceral is the language. Sarah Booker’s translation renders Ponce’s prose hypnotic, with sentences carrying on, further into the mind of the narrator, bending and twisting back on themselves.”
—Greg Walkin, Literal Magazine
“Before all else it is an exploration of femininity, of the female body as a metaphor of living and savage nature, of menstruation, of insanity, of desire, of sex—of this hole that is the uterus, amputating maternities.”
—Ariana Basciani, The Objective
“The narrator and protagonist of Blood Red… is wild. She bleeds, she runs, she separates herself. She bites, she gets drunk, she rollerskates, she sleeps around, she gets pregnant… in sum, she lives. Following her through caves and bodies is an exercise in risk.”
—Xavi Ayén, La Vanguardia
“Blood Red could be characterized by its multiplicity and a profoundly provocative spirit were it not futile to put a label on it. Those who make it to the end (which is not difficult, as it is a dizzying, captivating read) will find that everything can be doubted, especially in relationships. This impulse puts the novel in the trend of bold, fascinating contemporary narratives by Latin American women writers.”
—Gabriela Toro, La Periódica
“The strength of excess and overconsumption. The accelerated, irregular heartbeat of prose that attacks from all angles and doesn’t let the reader breathe, basking in its own exquisiteness.”
—José Andrés Bayas, Radio COCOA
About the Author
© Florencia Luna
Gabriela Ponce (Quito, 1977) is a fiction writer, playwright and theater director, as well as a professor of performing arts at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. In 2015, she published her first book Antropofaguitas, which was considered the best book of short stories by the Ministry of Culture. In 2019, she published the novel Sanguínea (Severo Editorial), also published in Spain by Editorial Candaya, which was awarded the Gallegos Lara prize by the Municipality of Quito for Best Novel of the Year. In 2020, she published Solo hay un jardín: en el fondo de todo hay un jardín (La Caída editorial) a compilation of her plays. She is part of Mitómana, performing arts collective and co-founder of the cultural venue Casa Mitómana. She is on the editorial board of Sycorax magazine.
About the translator
© Emily Booker
Sarah Booker (North Carolina, 1989) is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Press, 2022) and Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, The Baffler, and Nashville Review. She has a PhD in Hispanic Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently teaches Spanish in Morganton, NC.
Book Details
Paperback ISBN: 9781632063304 • $18.00
eBook ISBN: 9781632063311
Publication date: Oct 4 2022
5" x 7.125" • 192 pages
Fiction: Women / Pregnancy / Sex / Relationships
Territory: World English, Audio