Grave Goods

Book excerpt: Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa has said Fernando Iwasaki's work “delights and instructs all at once; it takes readers on a trip through a fantasy world while forcing them to face, without any fuss, a sinister reality, one dominated by fear.” In Spain's Diario Sur, Alfredo Taján highlights the book's strangeness, writing that it contains “chilling and wrenching stories of terror, where beasts, ghosts, vampires, incubi and succubi, crimes and enigmas cross over to the fresh breeze of everyday life without having to recur to remote geographies. Iwasaki describes his hells with a rare stylistic intuition that measures out the fear; it twists it, turns it into metaphor.” Renowned philologist, writer, and critic Miguel García Posada says of this book, “It's not a stretch to consider it one of the most notable revelations of recent Latin American literature.” Grave Goods contains ninety-eight pieces of flash fiction from one of Peru's best contemporary writers. While Fernando Iwasaki's stories—like all good horror stories—are intended to frighten or disconcert his readers, they are also often humorous in nature. Some re-create or re-envision urban legends, some come from dreams, and some are pure inventions of Iwasaki's remarkable mind. GRAVE GOODS - Translated into English for the first time!