"With a precise and visceral style, Daniela Tarazona presents the clinical course of a radical mutation - a change whose physiological symptoms emerge from a more intimate evolution. After the death of her mother, Irma decides to take a plane and hole upon a faraway beach. Through the course of her grief, the protagonist's body, her instincts, and her perception, begin to experience a transformation as unexpected as it is natural. The skin over her joints become thick and scaly, her eyes take on a yellow gleam, and she spends more and more time bathing in the hot sun. In these pages, Tarazona manages to address the perennial literary theme of metamorphosis, without relying on simple fantasy or didactic symbolism. More than a fable or a supernatural diversion, The Animal on the Rock is a profoundly biological and introspective novel with universal resonances"--
The sun gives me comfort. The temperature outside calibrates the temperature of my body, and I know I am immortal when Im on a rock.
After Irma's mother dies, she boards a plane to the coast. Soon she is consumed by strange dreams and irrational fears, and her body begins to transform in ways as unexpected as they are natural. The skin over her joints grows thick and scaly, her eyes take on a yellow gleam, and the border between reality and delirium becomes first elastic, then irrelevant. As the world around her tips out of balancethe weather turning volatile, strangers issuing cryptic warningsshe returns again and again to the rock where she undergoes metamorphosis: a series of radical mutations that enable her to survive.
Elemental and prophetic, intimate and universal, The Animal on the Rock bears witness to the terror and magnificence of being a child, a parent, a changing animal. A profoundly biological and introspective novel that lies somewhere between clinical record and fever dream.
Daniela Tarazona (Mexico City, 1975) is the author of Divided Island, winner of the prestigious Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize and published by Deep Vellum in 2024. In 2012, she published the novel El beso de la liebre (Alfaguara), which was shortlisted for the Las Americas Prize in 2013. In 2020, the book Clarice Lispector: La mirada en el jardn (Lumen) was published, co-written by Tarazona and Nuria Mel. Her work has been translated into English and French. She has been a fellow of Mexico's Young Artists program and is currently a member of the FONCA fund's National Network of Artists. In 2011, she was recognized as one of twenty-five Latin American literary secrets by the Guadalajara International Book Fair. The Animal on the Rock was her debut novel, and is her second to be translated into English.
Lizzie Davis is a translator, a writer, and former senior editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent translations include Juan Crdenas's Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize) and The Devil of the Provinces; Elena Medel's The Wonders, co-translated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Daniela Tarazona.
Kevin Gerry Dunn is a ghostwriter and Spanish/English translator whose book-length projects include Easy Reading by Cristina Morales (for which he received an English PEN Award and a PEN/Heim Grant) and work by Paul B. Preciado, Mara Bastars, Elaine Vilar Madruga, Ousman Umar, Daniela Tarazona, Javier Castillo, Paco Cerd, and Cristian Perfumo.
