About the book

Below the rooftops of Barcelona’s historic avenues, in the shadow of the Sagrada Família and its fleet of construction cranes, thrums a vital pulse: meal-delivery riders, sex workers, strung-out artists, anti-capitalist squatters, undocumented shopgirls, fledgeling drug dealers, and a thousand more lives that cross and knit together at the lowest level of Spain’s urban tumult. The young expats of these stories careen through crowded streets, nightclubs, and dating apps with a devil-may-care abandon that belies their precarious circumstances. Tragedy will erupt and then ebb in an instant, receding in the rearview like a roadside collision and haunting those that push on. Running on fumes and paltry tips, Banca’s beleaguered characters race along a knife’s edge and find unexpected solace in moments of shared vulnerability—a knowing thread that unites these strangers in a strange land.

In this English PEN Award–winning translation by Katie Brown, From Savagery announces Alejandra Banca as a resplendent and masterful new voice in Latin American literature—one that will take readers by storm.

Praise for From Savagery:

“Banca’s stories are impactful, heartfelt, quintessentially human, and visceral with desperation, trauma, and, finally, compañerismo/solidarity, and even hope.”

—Sara Martínez, Booklist

“From Savagery is an honest and delirious conversation between marginal and energetic characters, defeated but enthusiastic, ostracized but hopeful, crazed but determined to get ahead. Twelve roundtrip stories, from here and from there, of a hybrid Spain diluted by deep (Latin) America. An everyday tragedy of drivers who make their living pedaling between Barcelona and Caracas in a relentless battle for survival. Through Nanda’s eyes, Banca transforms Montjuïc into El Ávila, La Rambla into Catia Boulevard, and Camp Nou into the Brígido Iriarte stadium. In these wild pages, Banca stirs the emotional memory of the immigrant, and among the tears, uncertainties, and concerns for subsistence, she finds traces of hope and tenderness.”

—Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, author of The Lisbon Syndrome

“Because I know everything and don’t know what to do with that information. At some point, I’ll have to let it out and I’m afraid that it will be catastrophic. Alejandra Banca’s From Savagery is an extraordinary homage to the everyday life of a migrant community that is learning how to laugh, cry, love, and fight in an elsewhere where every decision is difficult and all-consuming. Each story confronts us with the unbearable responsibility of accompanying characters whose journeys around streets that at times feel like home and at times feel like purgatory are marked by the stench of a corpse without a grave, the dampness of a bicycle seat stained with blood, and the salty taste of the sweat dripping from faces that get lost in the invisible crowd of the informal workers. In other words, the material traces of uprooted lives forever excluded from the spectacular stages of nation-defining epics. From Savagery asks that we hold these traces the way we would hold the broken pieces of the mirror that used to reflect and contain, as an impossibly coherent whole, what it meant to be Venezuelan, and find in the pain of the thousand cuts the determination to do more than just survive and to be more than just ruins. A beautiful, devastating, and absolutely essential masterpiece.”

—Irina R. Troconis, author of The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution (forthcoming)

“Survival in the midst of the uncertainty of exile is the central theme of this book. The young people who try to survive in From Savagery depend on their bodies, always exposed, aching, exhausted. Bodies pushed to the limit, that find no respite in a city that chews them up and swallows them. And yet, joy permeates through the cracks where friendship thrives, to give way to luminous encounters and unexpected revelations. These stories force us to look at exile from its most vulnerable side: that of living from day to day, on the verge of collapse; that of the determination and stubbornness of making one’s way in a foreign territory. Without guarantees, but also without rest. Because there is always the hope of return or, at least, the certainty that the future awaits us.”

—Raquel Rivas Rojas, Venezuelan researcher, writer, and translator

“Some books sleep, others live, and others still create life. […] From Savagery brings life from impossible angles: crying, in the distance, and from nothingness.”

— Jan Queretz, Casapaís

“Banca’s characters grab you by the heart and refuse to let you go. Visceral, unflinching, ferocious, unashamed—an important and much-needed entry to the world’s literature.”

—Jade Song, author of Chlorine

“From Savagery speaks to the indomitable, rebellious existences of the flowers in the garden of an uninhabited house. These realities are characterized by their savagery, pain, and beauty as they continue to blossom despite the difficult circumstances that have plagued Venezuela in the last two decades.”

—Andrea Sofía Crespo Madrid, author of Tuétano

“Banca’s stories make readers uncomfortable: there are no happy endings, no rewards for the good, no self-improvement stories. However, they paint with overwhelming fidelity the harsh reality of Venezuelans who feel foreign on both sides of the ocean.”

—Maly Polotto, Sounds and Colours

About the author

About the translator

Book Details

Paperback ISBN: 9781632063588 • $17.00
eBook ISBN: 9781632063595
Publication date: August 27, 2024
5" x 7.125" • 272 pages
Fiction / Short Stories
Rights: North America & Philippines, Audio