Amparo Dávila - With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, loneliness, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, she makes nightmares come to life through the everyday

Amparo Dávila, The Houseguest: And Other Stories, Trans. by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris,  New Directions, 2018.




The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising, master storyteller
Like those of Kafka or Poe, Amparo Dávila’s stories are masterful, terrifying, and mesmerizing―you’ll finish reading each story gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, loneliness, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, she makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some form of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest, her debut collection in English, you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.


“The Houseguest will make you paranoid; you will second guess every shadow and slight movement that catches your eye. Amparo Dávila's prose, her psychological awareness, and the beauty of her characters' misery is encompassing. I cannot believe that this is the first that I am experiencing Dávila in English.”- Nick Buzanski, Book Culture


These 12 stories from Dávila are the first of the Mexican author’s to be translated into English and show her terrifying knack for letting horror seep into the commonplace and the domestic. In “Moses and Gaspar,” a man takes in his recently deceased brother’s pets and finds his life disintegrating; the story is all the more haunting because the reader never knows exactly what creatures the two pets are. In the title story, a woman’s distracted husband brings a mysterious man to their house, and the woman becomes unsettled by his lurking presence. In one of the best stories, “Musique Concrète,” a man’s longtime friend, Marcela, discovers that her husband is cheating on her. At night, Marcela is threateningly visited by the other woman, who resembles a toad. Filled with nightmarish imagery (“Sometimes I saw hundreds of small eyes fastened to the dripping windowpanes”) and creeping dread, Dávila’s stories plunge into the nature of fear, proving its force no matter if its origin is physical or psychological, real or imagined: “Even if [she] is exaggerating, these things do exist and they have destroyed her, they exist like these flames dancing in the fireplace.” - Publishers Weekly

“Like a dream, Dávila’s fictional realm is filled with signs and symbols, with hybrid creatures who appear to defy the laws of nature, and with characters who do not act according to logic or reason. Dávila has said in interviews that one of her favorite subjects is the mysterious, the unknown, that which is not within our grasp. Her writing is intentionally opaque and allows readers to draw a number of different interpretations; it is this intriguing, elusive quality that has perhaps led to her enduring popularity in Mexico.”- The Paris Review

“The work of Amparo Dávila is unique in Mexican literature. There is no one like her, no one with that introspection and complexity.”
- Elena Poniatowska

“Extraordinary. ”- Julio Cortázar


Amparo Dávila’s translator discovers the truth behind her fiction.