This debut collection by acclaimed translator Sarah Moses is rooted as much in sound and language as it is in story. The 75 tiny fictions that populate Strange Water are evocative soundscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, landscapes, often magical and mysterious, sometimes unsettling. Each story is rooted in a single sentence—a dream sentence, a mistake sentence, a sentence uttered when the speaker thought no one was listening—whose tendrils reach into unexpected places. Moses’s attention to the individual word and to sound is echoed in her attention to the physical presence of the line on the page. These compressed-to-bursting-point narratives—preoccupied with bad-mannered neighbours, misunderstandings, coincidences and serendipities, dream states, and subtropical climes—take place in constant movement: between languages, between homes, between continents.

Sarah Moses’s writing and translations have appeared in print and online, in Asymptote, Brick, Event, Harper’s Magazine and elsewhere. Her co-translation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel Die, My Love was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the Best Translated Book Award. Tender Is the Flesh and Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, by Agustina Bazterrica, were published in her translation in the UK and the US/Canada. Sarah edited the anthology Hija: Literary Daughters in Argentina for Palabras Errantes and was Asymptote‘s Editor-at-Large for Argentina. She holds an Honours B.Sc. in Biology from McMaster University and studied science writing at the University of Toronto and literary translation at the University of Buenos Aires. She is a member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and lives in Buenos Aires and Toronto, where she’s from. Her debut collection of short fiction, Strange Water, is forthcoming from 1366 Books, an imprint of Guernica Editions.

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