international rights
highlights fall 2017
We are a tiny publisher founded in Bogotรก in 2007. Our catalogue is the result of a thorough selection of literary fiction, nonfiction and graphic novels. We are interested in contemporary authors and nontraditional classics. We also offer an international rights catalogue of regional authors. Cohete Cรณmics is our graphic novel imprint.
Azares del cuerpo (Hazards of the Body) María Ospina Pizano short stories 2017 164 pp sinopsis: The bodies in this book migrate, look for each other, sometimes they also lose themselves. They are interpreters, voices than reveal stories about the desire of encountering others. Here, every body is a story. bio: María Ospina Pizano (Bogotá, 1977) studied History in Brown University and obtained a Ph.D in Hispanic Literatures in Harvard University, where she specialized in contemporary Latin American literature. Currently, she is a professor of Latin American culture at Wesleyan University. She worked at the Library Luis Ángel Arango in archive and curatorial projects, where she created the epistolar anthology for Libro al Viento, Cartas de la Persistencia (Instituto Distrital de Cultura, 2009).
fragment (Translated by the author): «She often has spare time to contemplate the white metal and concrete ceiling of the hypermarket. She inspects the naked panels interrupted by metallic tubes, cables, smoke detectors and cameras. She likes to glance up every morning to break lose from the fiction of purchases and sales. To remind herself that everything that is piled neatly under the bare roof—the aisles stuffed with products that glow strategically, the signs, the greetings—is a fleeting topography of packages and calculations. An artifice of abundance. She marvels at how all that merchandise serves to disguise with such efficiency the stark cube that forms the warehouse. She’s gotten into the habit of gazing up.» María Ospina’s book Azares del cuerpo is as anchored in Colombia’s contemporary reality as it is engaged with the exploration of the universal realm of imagination. Her exploration of the limits of unlikely relationships is a unique contribution to Latin American Literature. —Carolina Sanín The voice of María Ospina Pizano is accurate, sincere and necessary. —Alejandra Algorta, Sombralarga
Roza, tumba, quema (Slash and Burn) Claudia Hernández novel 2017 352 pp sinopsis: In war and in peace, a woman fights without guns for her daughters. Like in the old nomadic agriculture, she slashes and burns so these girls always have a place to come back to. bio: Claudia Hernández (San Salvador, 1975) studied Communications in the Technological University of El Salvador and has been a professor in the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (uca). She has published the short story books De fronteras, Otras ciudades, Olvida uno, Causas naturales and La canción del mar. In 2007 she was part of the literary encounter Bogotá 39. She has appeared in anthologies made in Spain, Italy, France, United States, and Germany, where she won, in 2004, the price Anna Seghers, a recognition for authors that show interest in contributing, through their artistic production, to the construction of a fair and humane society. The National Endowment for the Art has supported the translation to the English language of some of her books that explore the brutal impact of the civil war in El Salvador.
fragment (Translated by Julia Sanches for Words Without Borders): «When she turned fourteen, three men came for her at her maternal grandmother’s house, with guns. They said her father had sent them to tell her he was ill, near death, and that he wanted to see her. They would take her to him. »She recognized one of them, even though he’d shaved his head and his features had hardened since the last time she saw him: a year earlier, he’d been in one of the many camps her father had visited. She’d never seen the others, but could place them from the description she’d heard from one of her neighbors. Just three days ago her neighbor had warned her to leave and hide in the hills or in the gorges because there were three guerrillas with rifles wandering the area and raping any woman they found. They raped me then asked me where you lived, she said. They asked and I had to tell them.» rights sold: France (Editions Métalié) A palpitating feminine universe, full of drive and courage, permanently facing the violence that surrounds them. An intense and touching novel, and a very suggestive way of narrating that will captivate the reader. —Horacio Castellanos Moya
El verbo J (J The Verb) Claudia Hernรกndez novel 2018 210 pp sinopsis: He used to be a boy hounded by his dad and by all the community in a Central American country town. His manners made him different, so he decided to escape to the North. Before he could hit San Francisco, the city that protected him and let him be a beautiful woman, he got lost and was molested in Mexico City. After he finally found his sisters, loving and protecting, he also found a friend who was always with him. She guarded him from the sickness he got, from the churches that rejected him, from the men who broke his heart. This is the story of the life of a woman who used to be a boy and that found a new family that supported her when life was grim.
Memoria por correspondencia (The Book of Emma Reyes) Emma Reyes memoir 2012 212 pp sinopsis: In these letters, written between 1969 and 1997, Emma Reyes took the strenuous exercise of narrating the adversities she lived during her childhood, articulating a story which projects a thrilling voice due to the mixture of innocence and serenity with which she remembers her tragedy. bio: Emma Reyes (Bogotá, Colombia, 1919 // Bordeaux, France, 2003) was an artist who travelled the world along with her drawings and paintings. Most of her legacy remains outside of Colombia. In our country, her name is mostly known because artists and people from humanities met her abroad and came back fascinated by her talent and character. Colombia,s art history still owes her a proper recognition for her work. fragment (Translated by Daniel Alarcón for Penguin Classics): «Our life took place in the streets. Every morning i went to the garbage heap behind the beer factory to empty the bedpan we’d all used during the night. The bedpan was enormous and glazed
with white enamel, little of which remained. Every day it was full to the very top, the odors that emerged from it so nauseating that i often threw up. The trip to the garbage heap with that bedpan was the worst part of my day. I had to walk, scarcely breathing, eyes fixed on the shit, following its rhythm. Possessed by terror that i might spill it, i gripped the bedpan firmly with both hands, as if i were carrying a precious object. The weight was tremendous. My sister’s task was to go to the spigot to bring the water we needed for the day. As for Piojo, he had to go for coal and take out the ashes. So neither of them could help me. The best part of my day came once i’d emptied the bedpan on the garbage heap. That’s where all the neighborhood kids hung out, playing, screaming, sliding down a mountain of clay, squabbling with one another, fighting. They rolled around the mud puddles and dug through the garbage looking for what we called treasures: cans of beer to make music, pieces of wire or rubber, sticks, old shoes, old dresses. Everything interested us; the heap was our game room. I couldn’t play much because i was the smallest and the bigger kids didn’t like me. My only friend was a boy we teased for his limp. Even though he was the biggest of the children, we nicknamed him cojo. He’d lost one foot completely, sliced off by the tram one day when he was arranging leona bottle tops on the rails so the tram might flatten them like coins. Like the rest of us, cojo didn’t wear shoes, and he helped himself along with a stick, his only foot executing extraordinary leaps. When he started to run, no one could catch him.»
rights sold: World English (Penguin Classics usa); Brazil (Companhia das Letras); Netherlands (Meulenhoff); Israel (Zikit); Spain (Libros del Asteroide); Argentina (Edhasa); Mexico (Almadía); Greece (Ikaros); Italy (Sur); Sweden (Norstedts); France (Fayard); China (Thinkingdom); Taiwan (Emily); Denmark (Batzer); Portugal (Quetzal); Norway (Cappelen Damm); Germany (Bastei Lübbe); Slovakia (Inaque). It’s described with such quirky grace and raw honesty, such a childlike eye for detail and disarming explanation of the inexplicable, that it is as poetic as it is horrific. —Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian It’s ungrateful to want more than this artifact, which transforms suffering into art, but it’s hard not to wish that Reyes had written about her time in full. —John Williams, The New York Times A fine visual sensibility and an unusual generosity give even the darker passages a quality of delight. —The New Yorker
Los niños (The Children) Carolina Sanín novel 2013 152 pp sinopsis: Laura Romero lives with her dog Brus. A saturday midnight, a six-year-old appears under her balcony and he won’t tell where does he come from, neither would he say why is he there. He seems to ignore the way the world works. While he is assigned a new home, she takes him in and tries to give meaning to his presence. bio: Carolina Sanín (Bogotá, 1973) has published the novel Todo en otra parte (Seix-Barral, 2005), the essay Alfonso x, el Rey Sabio (Panamericana, 2009), the children’s book Dalia (Norma, 2010), and the short story collections Ponqué y otros cuentos (Norma, 2010 / Laguna, 2016) and Yosuyu (Destiempo, 2013). She has a Ph. D in Hispanic Literature from Yale University, where she specialized in Medieval Literature. She has worked as a translator and has taught at State University of New York-Purchase College and at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá. She’s also a columnist for the colombian journals El Espectador and the magazine Arcadia.
«Brus became aware of Fidel’s existence before she did. It was shortly before midnight on Saturday, and Laura had just filled the hot-water bottle she took to bed with her. The dog began to bark and then to howl, and in between could be heard sobs that semeed to be learned by heart, as if they came from a child who knows he’s still too big to be crying like that. Laura tilted her head the way Brus did when she asked him something, and realized the sound was coming from the street, on the right-hand side of the building as you looked out. She went onto the balcony. A boy was looking up from the pavement, three storeys down. As soon as he saw her appear, stopped crying. »“I’m going down,” Laura told the dog, who had hidden behind the sofa and was still howling.» rights sold: World English (MacLehose Press), World Spanish (Siruela), Perou (Estruendomudo) Disturbing and original, exploring the limits of identity and isolation. —Juan Carlos Morales, rne An excellent writer; one of the best in Colombia. —Evelio Rosero International rights for this book: victor@viclit.com
by Laguna Libros
This is our graphic novel imprint. Following the spirit of Laguna Libros, Cohete Cรณmics is an editorial lab that explores the possibilities of the graphic novel, focused on the lines of autobiographical, documentary and fictional comic.
Elefantes en el cuarto (Elephants in the Room) Sindy Elefante autobiographical graphic novel 2016 108 pp sinopsis: The innocent task of organizing the room brings Sindy a series of memories from her youth and childhood, her love for sports, for drawing, her first lovers: boyfriends and girlfriends. She always felt out of place until she understood for which “team” she wanted to play. bio: Sindy Infante Saavedra, or Sindy Elefante, was born in Bogotá, a Sunday afternoon in 1987. Since she was young she has liked drawing, writing, listening indie rock, dancing tropical music and playing soccer. She studied Visual Arts in the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá and the Master Degree in Illustration of Books for Children of the Cambridge School of Arts, in England. She teaches at the Arts Faculty of the Universidad Javeriana and she collaborates with the section of Entreviñetas of the national distributed newspaper El Espectador. Elephants in the Room is her first book.
A search for identity that includes, but doesn’t limit itself to sexual identity. —Ángel Castaño, Arcadia It’s an entertaining, humorous reading that leads you to question your own memories. —Sentiido
Dos Aldos (Two Toms) Pablo Guerra y Henry Díaz fictional graphic novel 2016 112 pp sinopsis: A neurobotanics lab in the middle of the desert is the place where a strange love triangle begins. The experiment that is developed there will confront the identity of the characters in this story, throwing them into a journey loaded with nudity and betrayal. bio: Guerra + Díaz is a creative duo from Colombia, dedicated to the production of comics with different tones and formats. Aside from the graphic novel Dos Aldos, they have produced short comics in digital media and the strip “Vale y su papá” in the newspaper El Espectador. Guerra and Díaz belong to the collective El Globoscopio. It’s an enormously appealing and intriguing story, with just a touch of a blue wash to give the comic a bit more flavor. —Rob Clough
Caminos condenados (Damned Paths) Diana Ojeda, Pablo Guerra, Camilo Aguirre y Henry Díaz documentary graphic novel 2016 88 pp sinopsis: In the region of Montes de María [Colombian Northwest], the paths were the means and the frontier. They connected ends and united neighbors. When the plots were fused into just one crops, into a green desert, nobody could go through those paths. They became damned paths. But those who crossed them haven’t disappeared: the time to listen to them has come. bios: Diana Ojeda is a researcher interested in Political Ecology and Feminist Geography. Pablo Guerra is a comic writer, editor and comic critic. Henry Díaz is a strip cartoonist and illustrator. Camilo Aguirre is an artist, educator and comic artist from Cali, Colombia. In between memories, illusions and representations of confinement, this novel describes, above all, the present of an unfair postconflict. —Tatiana Acevedo, El Espectador
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