Fabio Morabito was born in Egypt to an Italian family. When he was fifteen, his family relocated from Milan to Mexico City, and he has written all his work in Spanish ever since. He has published five books of poetry, five short-story collections, one book of essays, and two novels, and has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morabito has been awarded numerous prizes, most recently the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, Mexico's highest literary award, for Home Reading Service (Other Press, 2021). His work has been translated into several languages. He lives in Mexico City. Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond's Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.
Morabito has a remarkable gift for capturing those moments where we're pushed outside of ourselves, beyond our comfortable routines and social scripts, suddenly in a different story than the one we thought we were living-those little lies and encounters between strangers that haunt someone for a lifetime. The results are just as often subtly, simply poignant as they are shocking and mordantly funny. A master storyteller at work. -Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century Morabito's stories are haunting in their loneliness, cutting in their absurdity, surprising in their hilarity. They conjure vivid urban landscapes populated by individuals weighed down by memories, landscapes that feel both familiar and oddly surreal. These stories will stay with me for a very long time. -Dur e Aziz Amna, author of American Fever Praise for Home Reading Service: A satisfying fable, at once satiric and soulful, of a literary awakening in Mexico...this idiosyncratic performance will keep its audience rapt. -Publishers Weekly First, the tempting promise of an almost existential discovery, then bewilderment, subtle humor, and then everything in this story that seemed small and simple strikes back with extraordinary resonance. What a pleasure it always is to read Morabito. -Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream and Mouthful of Birds A wonderful addition to the literature of the picaresque, this vivid, original novel depicts the transformative power of literature within a society wrestling with its own social and political mutations. -Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters