Rafael Courtoisie - Thirteen short stories depict apocalyptic scenarios of people destroyed or corrupted by society or technology gone awry.

Rafael Courtoisie, The Red Sea, Trans. by Patricia Dubrava, 2004

excerpt (pdf)

Rafael Courtoisie lives and works in Montevideo, Uruguay and has won numerous international awards for his poetry and fiction, including the 2002 Jaime Sabines International Poetry Prize. The Red Sea, the second in a trilogy of short fiction collections, is his first English publication from SRLR Press.

Thirteen short stories depict apocalyptic scenarios of people destroyed or corrupted by society or technology gone awry. The title story presents a nightmarish vision of survival in a post-holocaust world where contaminated water takes on the biblical symbolism of the Red Sea. Stories include “The Trophy,” “The Uprising,” “Eratostenes,” “The Storm,” and “The Persistence of the Weak.”

 Uruguay has given us some of the “oddest” writers in Latin American literature (e.g. Levrero, Polleri, etc.), and the work of this author is anything but solemn: one of the strangest, most scathing and unapologetic I've ever read. - Luis Panini

The Shakes (story)