Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels,
PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first
collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy
Chloe Aridjis's stories and essays are known to transport readers into
liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a
woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of
Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâché
monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space,
cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but
tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public
spaces, "infusing them with a noble life force." In her pen portraits,
Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and
writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice
Hastings.
Exploring the complexity of exile and urban alienation, Dialogue with a
Somnambulist showcases "the rare writer who reinvents herself in each
book" (Garth Greenwell) and who is as imaginatively at home in the short
form as in her longer fiction.
