Blood Red

Gabriela Ponce (Quito, 1977) is a fiction writer, playwright and theater director, as well as a professor of performing arts at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. In 2015, she published her first book Antropofaguitas, which was considered the best book of short stories by the Ministry of Culture. In 2019, she published the novel Sanguínea (Severo Editorial), also published in Spain by Editorial Candaya, which was awarded the Gallegos Lara prize by the Municipality of Quito for Best Novel of the Year. In 2020, she published Solo hay un jardín: en el fondo de todo hay un jardín (La Caída editorial) a compilation of her plays. She is part of Mitómana, performing arts collective and co-founder of the cultural venue Casa Mitómana. She is on the editorial board of Sycorax magazine.Sarah Booker (North Carolina, 1989) is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Press, 2022) and Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, The Baffler, and Nashville Review. She lives in North Carolina.

“The strength of excess and overconsumption. The accelerated, irregular heartbeat of prose that attacks from all angles and doesn’t let the reader breathe, basking in its own exquisiteness.”—José Andrés Bayas, Radio Cocoa“The narrator and protagonist of Blood Red… is wild. She bleeds, she runs, she separates herself. She bites, she gets drunk, she rollerskates, she sleeps around, she gets pregnant… in sum, she lives. Following her through caves and bodies is an exercise in risk.” —Xavi Ayén, La Vanguardia“Blood Red could be characterized by its multiplicity and a profoundly provocative spirit were it not futile to put a label on it. Those who make it to the end (which is not difficult, as it is a dizzying, captivating read) will find that everything can be doubted, especially in relationships. This impulse puts the novel in the trend of bold, fascinating contemporary narratives by Latin American women writers.” —Gabriela Toro, La periódica“Before all else it is an exploration of femininity, of the female body as a metaphor of living and savage nature, of menstruation, of insanity, of desire, of sex—of this hole that is the uterus, amputating maternities.”—Ariana Basciani, The Objective