On March 12th, a very special session of the Translated Fiction Book Club will be taking place at Bookish: Used Books & Art in Oklahoma City. We’ll be discussing Crocodiles at Night, a novel by Gisela Heffes, translated by Grady C. Wray who will both be joining for the discussion!
Although the outcome of Crocodiles at Night does not remain a surprise beyond the first paragraph, it expands outwards in philosophical, heartfelt reverberations true to Heffes's style. Crocodiles at Night explores familial ties, memories and images of places that are no longer the same, the vagaries of the medical system, and social critique in this unfeigned, excruciating view of death and how it affects all who experience it.
Gisela Heffes is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Johns Hopkins University as well as a writer, ecocritic, and public intellectual with a particular focus on literature, media, and the environment in Latin America. She is the author of several novels, including Ischia (Deep Vellum, 2023). She currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Grady C. Wray has taught Latin American literature, Spanish, and Translation at the University of Oklahoma for over two decades. He published the first bilingual critical edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz' Devotional Exercises. Apart from his critical work on women writers of the pre-modern period, his translations of poetry and fiction include Ischia (Deep Vellum, 2023) and The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020) by Gisela Heffes; 2323 Stratford Ave. (2018) by Marcelo Rioseco; and Series 201 (2017) by Luisa Valenzuela.