Name: A Sunny Place for Shady People
Rating: 3.421875 (16 reviews)

Mariana Enríquez

Mariana Enriquez's A Sunny Place for Shady People is her first story collection since the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, the occult and the macabre, the stories explore love, womanhood, LGBTQ counterculture, parenthood and Argentina's brutal past.

A Sunny Place for Shady People 

Un lugar soleado para gente sombría

“On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.”

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”

Stories

A Sunny Place for Shady People

A great mix of stories that are more of socio-political observations and ones that are straight up gruesome. I can't believe that she also pulled some creepypasta monsters - what a time to be alive.

Favourite stories: "My Sad Dead" (extremely timely and also clear in its messaging), "Night Birds" (big "We Have Always Lived in the Castle Vibes" to me), "Different Colors Made of Tears", and "A Local Artist".

A great mix of stories that are more of socio-political observations and ones that are straight up gruesome. I can't believe that she also pulled some creepypasta monsters - what a time to be alive.

Favourite stories: "My Sad Dead" (extremely timely and also clear in its messaging), "Night Birds" (big "We Have Always Lived in the Castle Vibes" to me), "Different Colors Made of Tears", and "A Local Artist".

Stories of ghosts, of possession, of murderous clothing and jewelry, stories about the transformation of the body or about the cult of a girl who drowned in a water tank, or about the hyenas that can still be heard in a place where a zoo burned.

Un Lugar Soleado Para Gente Sombría

Nocti Vagante

No soy asiduo al género. Quería empezar leyendo una novela de Mariana Enríquez, porque la elogiaban mucho. Y como justo salió este libro de relatos, empecé por acá. Bueno, no me gustó nada. Me pareció torpe en su construcción, como si alguien fuera paseando por un pasillo lleno de estanterías con elementos del terror, cargando algunas cosas a medida que las veía. O sea, digamos, sin mayor sentido que juntarlas. La ambientación tampoco está trabajada. Relatos torpes de ejecución y más que nada aburridos, con un trabajo bastante vago. Pero bueno, creo que me va a gustar más una novela de ella. Un lugar playito para gente consumista.

Mumtaz Obsiye

Argentina gothic fiction, strong start but felt repetitive at the end. I think short story collections might not be for me 

A Sunny Place for Shady People

Reviews

Highlights