Fabio Morabito – författare

In this poignant novel, a man guilty of a minor offense finds purpose unexpectedly by way of his punishment—reading to others.  After an accident—or “the misfortune,” as his cancer-ridden father’s caretaker, Celeste, calls it—Eduardo is sentenced to a year of community service reading to the elderly and disabled. Stripped of his driver’s license and feeling impotent as he nears thirty-five, he leads a dull, lonely life, chatting occasionally with the waitresses of a local restaurant or walking the streets of Cuernavaca. Once a quiet town known for its lush gardens and swimming pools, the “City of Eternal Spring” is now plagued by robberies, kidnappings, and the other myriad forms of violence bred by drug trafficking.    At first, Eduardo seems unable to connect. He movingly reads the words of Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, and more, but doesn’t truly understand them. His eccentric listeners—including two brothers, one mute, who moves his lips while the other acts as ventriloquist; deaf parents raising children they don’t know are hearing; and a beautiful, wheelchair-bound mezzo soprano—sense his detachment. Then Eduardo comes across a poem his father had copied by the Mexican poet Isabel Fraire, and it affects him as no literature has before.    Through these fascinating characters, like the practical, quick-witted Celeste, who intuitively grasps poetry even though she never learned to read, Fabio Morábito shows how art can help us rediscover meaning in a corrupt, unequal society.

Drawing from everyday life in Mexico and abroad, these subtle, unsettling stories probe the boundaries between sanity and madness, life and death, safety and danger.The first story collection from prize-winning author Fabio Morábito available in English, Mothers and Dogs features fifteen tales that show the emotional extremes in seemingly trivial details and quotidian situations: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn’t been fed than they do about their dying mother; when the lights go out on a racetrack, a man’s evening jog turns into a savage battle between runners; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother.    As he deftly explores feelings of loneliness and despair endemic in modern society, Morábito weaves threads of unexpected humor and lightness.

A brilliant, unsettling collection of 18 stories about deception, translation, loneliness, and connection, from one of Mexico’s greatest modern writers.Why is grass in airports so important? Can you be an extraordinary copyist without knowing how to read or write? Are there successful musicians who only play a single note in their life? Book after book, Fabio Morábito’s stories have become increasingly radical in their way of showing us that imagination is not a curious feature of the mind, but perhaps the only way to not feel excluded from the real world.With prose free of unnecessary explanation and descriptive embellishments, The Shadow of the Mammoth insists once again on the guiding principle of Morábito’s work: playing fair with the reader, who advances in reading these stories as he did when writing them, open to any direction they could take. For this reason, these stories are as unexpected as they are different from each other, all united by that pleasure of storytelling that has always been Morábito’s unmistakable hallmark.

In 84 brief, brilliant texts that combine fiction and essay, an acclaimed Mexican author examines the role of language in our lives with insight and humor.Forced to work with used notebooks, students learn to get creative and fill the limited space.A man makes his way through Anna Karenina in fits and starts, telling himself that he’s laying the foundation for the day he’ll read it properly.A woman feels isolated with a husband and daughter who don’t speak her native language, and he begins to question how well he actually knows his wife.Touching on a host of celebrated authors who shaped his life and writing—from Homer to Kafka, Camus, and Beckett—Fabio Morábito offers a delightful, multifaceted meditation on expressing ourselves through words. What do our libraries say about us? What differentiates poetry from prose? Why do interpreters forget what they translate so quickly? How can reading change us and how others see us?

Winner of the Premio Valle Inclán Prize 2025A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024Fabio Morabito is one of Mexico's best loved and most entertaining contemporary writers, his narratives marked by a humane irony and a philosophical resignation to the vagaries of his society and the irresistible tyrannies of time. Some of his poems make the reader laugh out loud, and Richard Gwyn's translations are true to the tone and manner of the originals. This is the first collection of his poems to appear in English, putting right a significant omission.The fifty-four poems in Invisible Dog were selected by the poet and translator in collaboration and draw from his five published collections spread over four decades. Readers enjoy a comprehensive introduction to his work in breadth and depth. His formal and thematic developments illuminate the wider context of modern Latin American writing, its inventive playfulness, its evasion of conventions of 'national culture'.Morabito was born to Italian parents in Alexandria in 1955 and has lived in Mexico City since the age of fifteen. His position as a poet writing in a second language contributes to his unique voice and vision. It is possible in these versions to detect elements of the poet's 'foreignness' in his straightforward lexical choices, which have the effect of making the poems somehow vulnerable, as in 'Journey to Patzcuaro', a sort of allegory for the immigrant experience.

In Morábitos Geschichten ist es nur ein winziger Schritt vom Alltäglichen zum Grotesken. Aus häuslichen Müttern werden nackte animalische Wesen, die den Männchen auf Bäumen auflauern, Stubenfliegen tragen Namen, Erdbeben werden zu lauernden Tieren in ihrem Bau. Immer verweigern sich die Objekte des Erzählens ihren Alltagsfunktionen und erlangen ein anarchisches Eigenleben. So wird der Schwamm zu einem verschlungenen Labyrinth, zum Inbegriff des Chaos; die Schere verteilt Botschaften der Kälte. Auch Hammer, Lappen, Sprungfeder und Seil bestechen durch ihren ganz persönlichen Charakter, durch die ihnen nahezu seelisch innewohnende Eigenheit.Morábito, der in Mexiko-Stadt wohnt, sucht nicht den Überblick, die große Perspektive; seine Texte visieren das Abgelegene, das fast mikroskopische Detail.Von Fabio Morábito außerdem in der Edition diá:Das geordnete Leben. ErzählungenAus dem mexikanischen Spanisch von Thomas Brovot und Susanne LangeMit einem Nachwort von Michi StrausfeldISBN 9783860345467

Der Erzähler Morábito versteht es, den Leser in eine phantastische Welt inmitten des Alltäglichen zu versetzen. Seine Prosa schafft prägnante Bilder und Situationen - Sprache als »Zauberwerkzeug«, mit dem die Dinge ihrem gewohnten Raum entzogen und in neuem Licht präsentiert werden. Meister der präzisen Sprache und Beobachtung, lotet er in Das geordnete Leben den Mahlstrom der steten Verunsicherungen und kleinen Katastrophen im Alltag aus. Ob Verwandtenbesuch, Wohnungsbesichtigung oder Geburtstagsfest: allenthalben lauert die Anarchie, unmerklich entfalten sich Kräfte, die die Figuren den Boden unter den Füßen verlieren lassen. Doch unter dem Riss an der Oberfläche tut sich nicht nur der Abgrund auf, sondern auch eine Welt der großen Sehnsüchte im kleinen Leben.von Fabio Morábito außerdem in der Edition diá:Die langsame Wut. ProsaAus dem mexikanischen Spanisch von Thomas Brovot und Susanne LangeISBN 9783860345450

En un tiempo en que cazar era lo que daba sentido a la vida y la identidad de las panteras era una interrogante que estaba sin respuesta, una joven pantera queda huérfana cuando su madre ataca a un búfalo. Inicia entonces un viaje en busca de su identidad durante el cual enfrentará los retos y peligros de la vida en la selva y aprenderá a sobrevivir y a luchar por ser parte de su entorno.

A partir de una minuciosa investigación etnográfica y lingüística de los relatos de tradición oral más representativos del país, Fabio Morábito reúne en esta antología 125 cuentos provenientes de regiones que van desde Sonora hasta Chiapas, desde los tarahumaras hasta los chontales y, más allá todavía, incursionar en California y Nuevo México, para reaparecer más adelante en Veracruz y Querétaro. Acompañados de ilustraciones elaboradas por ocho ilustradores mexicanos, los relatos seleccionados ofrecen una visión sobre los temas ancestrales que han perdurado en la tradición de los pueblos mexicanos: la creación del mundo, la aparición del Sol y de la Luna, la aparición del primer hombre, el surgimiento de las ciudades, así como historias donde el humor y la astucia son los temas centrales.

En un tiempo en que cazar era lo que daba sentido a la vida y la identidad de las panteras era una interrogante que estaba sin respuesta, una joven pantera queda huérfana cuando su madre ataca a un búfalo. Inicia entonces un viaje en busca de su identidad durante el cual enfrentará los retos y peligros de la vida en la selva y aprenderá a sobrevivir y a luchar por ser parte de su entorno.

A partir de una minuciosa investigación etnográfica y lingüística de los relatos de tradición oral más representativos del país, Fabio Morábito reúne en esta antología 125 cuentos provenientes de regiones que van desde Sonora hasta Chiapas, desde los tarahumaras hasta los chontales y, más allá todavía, incursionar en California y Nuevo México, para reaparecer más adelante en Veracruz y Querétaro. Acompañados de ilustraciones elaboradas por ocho ilustradores mexicanos, los relatos seleccionados ofrecen una visión sobre los temas ancestrales que han perdurado en la tradición de los pueblos mexicanos: la creación del mundo, la aparición del Sol y de la Luna, la aparición del primer hombre, el surgimiento de las ciudades, así como historias donde el humor y la astucia son los temas centrales.

Acaso en el brillo de las latas vacías en la basura, en la luz de los apartamentos y los faros, en la luna diurna o en los pájaros, ha encontrado Morábito una música (una gracia en el sentido más secular) que trae el trazo espontáneo, el estilo sin esfuerzo, la posibilidad del canto.