Cover

“Beneath the impeccable surface of Navarro’s ice-cold prose, dread and grief wrestle in a territory of uncanny shadows. Like the work of many great fantasists before her—Robert Walser, Leonora Carrington, Witold Gombrowicz, Remedios Varo—Navarro takes alien landscapes and turns them into eerily apt mirrors of our most secret realities. Grimly comedic, deeply affecting, these stories are a necessary poison, one that revives instead of destroys, emboldens rather than deadens. In spite of all the ghosts, madnesses, nightmares, and grotesque transformations they are subject to, her characters manage to make their own maps, turning endings into beginnings, disgust into love, death to peace: Rabbit Island is a series of unforgettable journeys designed by a master cartographer.”

—MARYSE MEIJER, author of The Seventh Mansion and Rag: Stories

“On the farthest edges of radical honesty, Navarro discovers something surreal. Reading Rabbit Island is like spending a week at an abandoned hotel with rooms inhabited by haunted bunnies and levitating grandmothers. Dark, brilliant, and addictive.”

—SANDRA NEWMAN, author of The Heavens

“The stories in Rabbit Island are as surprising and delightful as they come. Here there are no mundane worlds: wherever an Elvira Navarro story begins, it eventually leads to the uncanny borderlands between dream and nightmare, love and fear, science and mystery, all of which are, of course, reality itself.”

—MATT BELL, author of Appleseed

“Striking and visceral, Rabbit Island is a surreal masterpiece. Each story surprises with its enticing balance of the grotesque and the mundane. Navarro’s latest work is truly one to be savored.”

—LAURA GRAVELINE, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)

“Elvira Navarro writes like a dream… Or is it a nightmare? Smoke-saturated hostels, dive bars, run-down neighborhoods with a scenic view of the open sewer—Navarro’s crisp prose stands in stark contrast to the seedy worlds of her stories. Here on Rabbit Island, she picks up life’s roadkill and, with a surgeon’s hand, peels back the skin to reveal its inner workings in all its grotesque beauty.”

—DEVON DUNN, Book Culture (New York, NY)

“Elvira Navarro is certainly an excellent storyteller, sharp and brave. Her prose sounds always precise, confident, intense. Among the authors of my generation in Spain, I think she is, doubtless, one of the most engaging.”

—ANDRÉS NEUMAN, author of Fracture

“This author’s literary talent is a natural gift…the subtle, almost hidden, true avant-gardist of her generation.”

—ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS, author of Mac’s Problem

“Elvira Navarro is an enormously gifted and disturbing young writer with an unusual eye for the bizarre; she captures personal fragility with deceptively detached prose that stays with us like a scarring incision.”

—LINA MERUANE, author of Seeing Red

RABBIT ISLAND

Dedication

Also by Elvira Navarro from Two Lines Press

A WORKING WOMAN

Title Page

RABBIT ISLAND

STORIES

Elvira Navarro

Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

Gerardo’s Letters

GERARDO’S LETTERS