You Glow in the Dark (Ustedes Brillan en lo Oscuro)

Translated into English by Chris Andrews

WINNER OF THE 2022 PREMIO RIBERA DEL DUERO IN SPAIN

The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi’s writing—at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific—casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: Was that realistic or fantastic? Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation—the book’s stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there’s the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader’s attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent.

‘An eerie mix of the familiar and unreal. Colanzi is intent on blending genres (horror, cyberpunk, literary fiction). Her reality is a warped one, shifting between a violent past and frightening future, where the heat and toxic radiation – and the babble of inner voices – combine to create a hallucinatory vision’

– The New York Times

‘You Glow in the Dark is a collection of uncompromising vision, not at all afraid to show us who we are—and what we might still become."

- LA Review of Books

"You Glow in the Dark is a book that manages to be sophisticated in its politics, savvy in its experimentation with genre, and inherently Latin American in its landscape and voice. It is a masterfully written, singular collection, reflecting an originality and formal exploration that one doesn’t encounter very often."

- Words Without Borders  

‘It is a slippery collection of short stories. You slip into that ambiguous reality, in that disturbing reality that is also beautiful and terrifying’

– Rosa Montero  

'Tinged with futuristic flourishes and set largely in the Bolivian Altiplano, these stories examine the aftermath of terrible trespasses, mostly only whispered about. The 'alien gaze' is a keen instrument for dissecting the human condition, and Colanzi employs it to great effect here.'

— Kirkus ★

'A shimmering collection focused on the ruinous consequences of human folly… Taken together, these stories paint an arresting portrait of corruption, industrialization, the power of nature, and supernatural forces.'

—Publishers Weekly ★

'Places, molecules, and species sprawl and mutate; centuries-long retrospection, cyberpunk grit, first-person dream narrative, and religious fantasia fit together, simultaneously fabulist and real, vivified by Colanzi’s mysteriously lucid prose… In Colanzi’s writing, reality is grander and weirder than we imagined.'

— Drew Zeiba, Los Angeles Review of Books

'Liliana Colanzi won the International Ribera Del Duero Prize for You Glow in the Dark, further evincing the tremendous talent of this Bolivian writer whose fiction has opened up new spaces in our literature of the strange and the fantastic.'

— Latin American Literature Today

'In Colanzi’s tales, violence is something in the air or soil, something ready to take us over or occupy our lives at any moment'

– Chicago Review of Books

'A rare excellence: a capacity to combine the ambiguity of poetry with the clarity of a revelation.'

— Carlos Pardo, El País

'Perhaps the best thing about the collection are the coincidences that thread through it . . . the luminosity of the book resides in these encounters and synchronicities, like the blue light that shines from the contaminated people in the last story, the blue of death, but also of a star or the bottom of the ocean.'

— Rosamaría Durán, Otra Parte