Agustina Bazterrica

A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh. From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways—often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,” a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbor jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,” and in “Candy Pink,” a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps. Written in Bazterrica’s signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires.

Stories

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird

Diecinueve garras y un pájaro oscuro

james cao

"You're very pretty. Isabel doesn't know anything, don't pay attention to her." He kissed me and then he did it again. He told me that after class tomorrow he wanted to see my little bunny. He wanted to see it so he could teach it to be on its best behavior.

Experience oedipal guilt for the evil in the world, for war in particular, for death in general. Regret that you're unable to poke your eyes out, that you don't have the courage, that you don't know how to live through a real tragedy

But you intuit that each of us is a wolf devouring the other in exquisite eternity. A wolf that does so with the subtle delicacy of bites that flow like caresses over skin being maimed. That slip like hights inside drops, like drops inside glass, like glass containinga wolf, a wolf that looks like a man on a corner. Who's going to kill you.

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird quotes

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