May 14, 2025, 9:30am
According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, “My Sad Dead”
I am utterly bewitched by Mariana Enriquez’s work. Our Share of Night, her first novel translated into English, was one of my favorite books of 2023 but her short fiction is what first grabbed me and continues to have a hold on me. She, along with the incredible cohort of Latin American writers who’ve been brought into English translation in the last decade or so, manages to be both genre-agnostic (her work could be horror, could be thriller, could be literary fiction, could be true crime, could be any number of things depending on any given line or paragraph) while being deeply rooted in the gleeful play of genre spaces. “My Sad Dead” is a great example of this interplay: it’s a story about ghosts and violent death, but it’s also a story about a neighborhood, about a parent-child relationship, about state violence. No matter how you want to classify her work, I’m positive you’ll fall under Enriquez’s spell as well.
The story begins:
First, I think I should describe the neighborhood. Because my house is in the neighborhood, and my mother is in the house, and you can’t understand one thing without the other, and you especially can’t understand why I don’t leave. Because I could leave. I could leave tomorrow.
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).