The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. It was built by a smalltime hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can't leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, Layla Martinez's eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as "a house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge, " this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.

Layla Martínez (Madrid, 1987) is the author of two nonfiction books in Spanish, Surrogate Pregnancy (Pepitas de calabaza, 2019) and Utopia is not an Island (Episkaia, 2020), as well as stories and articles in numerous anthologies. She has translated essays and novels, writes about music for El Salto, and about television for La Última Hora. Since 2014 she has co-directed the independent publisher Antipersona. Woodworm is her first novel.

Martínez will be in conversation with Lily Meyer. Meyer is a translator, critic, and author of the novel Short War. A contributing writer at The Atlantic, her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. Her novel The End of Romance is forthcoming from Viking. Lily holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati, and will be Princeton University’s translator-in-residence in Fall 2024. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review.

This event is free with first come, first serve seating.

To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email [email protected] ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.