Cockfight

Ampuero’s grotesque, unflinching English-language debut looks at women’s experience of trauma and survival in an unnamed South American country. In the title story, a young woman covers herself in rooster blood and intestines to drive away older men who try to take advantage of her. In “Pups,” an unnamed woman returns to her stifling hometown and visits a man she’d grown up with who forced her to perform oral sex when she was 12 and he was 13. Back in his apartment years later, voluntarily reenacting the experience, she crunches a cockroach under her knee and notes that the man “smells like an abandoned elderly person.” In “Mourning,” the collection’s standout, teenage Marta takes beatings from her father to protect her sister, María, who in turn faces gang rape at the hands of their older brother by men from the neighborhood after they discover she’s not a virgin. In retaliation, Marta and María poison their brother. After he dies, the sisters’ joyful dance comes as welcome relief from Ampuero’s nearly relentless violence and nightmarish imagery. While some of the stories are drowned by horrific details, such as the ratlike babies in “Monsters,” others offer a glaring view of the impact of misogynistic violence and oppression. This will appeal to fans of unrepentant feminist fiction. (May)