El marido de mi madrastra

El marido de mi madrastra

Short stories
Tusquets Editores, 2021
232 pages

Aurora Venturini achieves a collection of stories about a gallery of strange and deformed characters. Cats flying in the middle of tornadoes. Girls born with a black lump on their necks. A teacher who falls in love with a circus ventriloquist. Gypsies, child-monsters, old men and women who beat their daughters.

Owner of an exceptional style, lyrical and sordid all at once, Venturini narrates in an irrepressible way the perverse and macabre parts of the world. She captures its rare characters before they disappear. Divided into two parts, El marido de mi madrastra and Hadas, brujas y señoritas, the stories merge and blend into a single way of understanding literature and life: as a succession of shadows, sometimes ghosts and sometimes threats, interrupted by brief flickers of painful light.

With her dissident and disruptive voice, Aurora knew how to put herself in everyone’s mouth. El marido de mi madrastra is a writing outside prototypes. It is that spectral and chilling light. A perverse door that inverts-perverts the horrific and the vile. But what is not horrific and vile? Ariana Harwicz

Boundless fictions with the virtue of attesting to the dire, misty and fearsome are born from Venturini’s wise alchemy. This, without ever losing the beauty or diminishing the impact of its eloquent efficiency. Jorge Consiglio, Perfil

El marido de mi madrastra is a new sample of the phenomenon that is Aurora Venturini. Attributed both to a tenacious writing, unconcerned with its echoes, and to a reframing of the narrative canon. Matías Capelli, Los Inrockuptibles

Venturini’s universe is (…) that one of the monstrous, of dysfunctional families, of the disfigured and the politically incorrect. From her pen pour out sinister stories that are told with total ease. As if horror were an everyday thing not worth being frightened of. Noelia Maldonado, La Voz

Like few others in our recent literature, groundbreaking and refreshing. Daniel Arias Fuenzalida, Los Andes

Aurora Venturini proves with these stories that she is still the most daring and innovative, the youngest storyteller in Argentina. Página 12

Venturini is brutal. Radar Libros

A collection of sour stories that challenge and subject the reader to daring and disturbing realities with intoxicating clarity. Diario de Río Negro