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The She-Devil in the Mirror book cover
The She-Devil in the Mirror
2000
First Published
3.81
Average Rating
180
Number of Pages

Salvadorean society is shocked by the gruesome murder of a young upper-class woman, and no one more so than her best friend Laura. In her first-person solo narration, Laura rattles on and on about her disbelief and horror at the evils all around her― but who’s that in the mirror? Laura Rivera can’t believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya’s relentless, obsessive narrator―female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable―paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse. Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness was acclaimed “an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art” ( Village Voice ) and “a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials” (Russell Banks).

Avg Rating
3.81
Number of Ratings
623
5 STARS
22%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Horacio Castellanos Moya
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Author · 16 books
HORACIO CASTELLANOS MOYA is a writer and a journalist from El Salvador. For two decades he worked as editor of news agencies, magazines and newspapers in Mexico, Guatemala and his own country. As a fiction writer, he was granted residencies in a program supported by the Frankfurt International Book Fair (2004-2006) and in the City of Asylum program in Pittsburgh (2006-2008). He has also taught in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2009, he was guest researcher at the University of Tokyo with a fellowship granted by the Japan Foundation. He has published eleven novels, five short story collections, two essay books, and a diary. His novels have been translated into twelve languages; five of them (Senselessness, The She-Devil in the mirror, Dance with Snakes, Revulsion, and Tyrant memory) are available in English. He was awarded the Manuel Rojas Iberoamerican Prize for Fiction 2014, by the Government of Chile.
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