Abyss

Praise for Pilar Quintana

"Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn't know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them." -YURI HERRERA, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

"How can I sum up everything that fascinates me about Pilar Quintana. Her incredible lyricism. Her path against the unexpected. The tension–razor-sharp, poetic and uncompromising."–SARA MESA

"Pilar Quintana is pure literature." –LARA MORENO

"Quintana has an impressive ability to tell truly deep stories that outwardly appear quite simple. Precise and concrete, her characters so human it's impossible not to empathize with them."– SARA JARAMILLO KLINKERT

Praise for Abyss

2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

"A bourgeois apartment becomes a lush green jungle in this vivid, restrained story of the generational burdens of motherhood, as told by Claudia, a resilient eight-year-old named after–who else?–her mother. The treacherous domestic terrain of Abyss offers the keen-eyed Claudia an early education in adult selfishness and betrayal, and Pilar Quintana's subtle, affecting evocation of that terrain–which loses nothing in Lisa Dillman's masterful English translation–is a triumph of perception and representation." –National Book Award Judges Citation

"An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from Colombian writer Quintana (The Bitch). Readers will be dazzled." –Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

"Claudia, the 8-year-old narrator of Pilar Quintana's Abyss,
lives in an apartment so overgrown with plants she calls it "the jungle."
Outside, the city of Cali, Colombia, is "gloomy and desolate, like the inside
of a very old house." She's frequently left to her own devices, her mother too
engrossed in celebrity tabloids like Hola! and Vanidades, her father working
late at the family supermarket. Quintana's spare, atmospheric novel, succinctly
translated by Lisa Dillman, explores Claudia's high anxiety and the terrors of
the adult world." –Anderson Tepper, The New York Times

"A terrifying vision of what it means to inherit our
parents' fears and disillusionments. Perhaps Pilar Quintana's greatest
achievement is to immerse us in Claudia's phantasmagorical jungle without us
really noticing, before swiftly unveiling a daughter's fantasy to a be a
mother's painful reality; to remind us that phantoms are all the more
frightening when they are real." –Times Literary Supplement

"A vivid and compelling
exploration of family dynamics and the damage they can do, Abyss is a
tale to fall into and learn from." –New Internationalist

"Chasms, both within the earth and between people, can be
hard to bridge, as Pilar Quintana (The Bitch) reinforces in Abyss,
her mesmerizing novel translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Abyss
is a riveting story of regret, opportunities squandered and the fear that
family misfortunes will persist through generations." –Michael Magras, Sh