Translation Rights TQE / With the Anguish from the Past Storm. Almost all of the short stories

On his previous works:                                                                                                       

«Horacio Castellanos Moya should partake in the honors of the select group of the best narrators in Spanish. A vigorous, unfriendly, airy voice that dares to advance towards an abyss without bothering to stop when the precipice comes into view. Tirana memoria is the culmination of Horacio Castellanos’s narrative, and that is enough to enthrone him where he deserves to be. Way up there.»  Andrés Pau, Levante

«Through the use of several perspectives (the writing of a diary, a first person narrator, and an omniscient voice), this novel beautifully ties in narrative, life, humor, and as many tragedies as possible. »   J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip, Qué Leer

«Horacio Castellanos Moya has been wanting to write a novel based on El Salvador’s dictatorship for a while now. That old aspiration of his has taken shape in this amazing work. »   Víctor Fernández, La Razón

Refugees who run away with fear as their only inseparable companion, people pulled from their roots and forced to witness a violence that changes their lives forever, the irreparably maladjusted: these are the characters that people the pages of Con la congoja de la pasada tormenta. Some stories are born from the experience of war, others from exile, and many from difficult personal relationships. But the feeling that hovers over them all is one of loneliness and anguish. The main character of “El pozo en el pecho” (“The Well in the Chest”) needs to go to a hotel bar looking for Ema, and that of “Torceduras” (“Sprains”) is doomed to suicide. He writes, “Exile is typical of the melancholic” in “Variaciones sobre el asesinato de Francisco Olmedo” (“Variations on the Murder of Francisco Olmedo”), and the narrator of “Perfil prófugo” (“Fugitive Profile”) feels that very melancholy during his last night in Toronto. The brothels and the alcohol are fleeting balms that make a double existence necessary. In every one of these short stories, Castellanos Moya proves his masterful skill for creating characters and environments, and his dialogues always manage to move us deeply.

This books gathers “almost all his short stories” previously published in magazines and in four books that can no longer be found by his growing number of readers: Perfil de prófugo (Fugitive Profile, 1987), El gran masturbador (The Great Masturbator, 1993), Con la congoja de la pasada tormenta (With the Anguish from the Past Storm, 1995), and Indolencia (Indolence, 2004).

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He was brought up in El Salvador and has lived, since 1979, in different cities throughout America and Europe. He worked as a journalist in Mexico City for twelve years and lived in Frankfurt, Germany, as a guest writer of the International Frankfurt Book Fair. He currently teaches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has been invited as a guest professor at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of eight novels, six of which have been published by Tusquets, translated into several languages and critically acclaimed. In 2009 the English translation of his novel Insensatez (Senselessness) received the XXVIII Northern California Book Award.