© Gabriel Diaz
María Sonia cristoff
María Sonia Cristoff (Trelew, Patagonia, 1965) is the author of five works of fiction and nonfiction, including False Calm and Include Me Out, and lives in Buenos Aires, where she teaches creative writing. Her journalism can be found in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Perfil, and La Nación. She has edited volumes on literary nonfiction (Idea crónica and Pasaje a Oriente) and participated in a series of collective works. Her work has been translated into six languages.
Titles by María Sonia Cristoff
A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia
María Sonia Cristoff
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm is the breakout work by Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff. Writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia, Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. In prose that showcases her sharp powers of observation, Cristoff explores Patagonia’s complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit.
María Sonia Cristoff
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
Mara is a simultaneous interpreter who moves to a provincial town in Argentina in order to speak as little as possible for a year. Steeled with the ten rules of silence set out in her manual of rhetoric, she takes a job as a guard in the local museum. The advantages of her work are threatened when she’s asked to assist in the re-embalming of the museum’s pride and joy: two horses―of great national and historical significance―are disintegrating and must be saved. But her goal and her slippery grasp on sanity lead her to more anarchistic means to bolster her purpose. Bold, subversive, and threaded through with acerbic wit, Include Me Out is an exploration of the range and expression of female silence.