Blood Red

Sarah Booker (North Carolina, 1989) is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Press, 2022) and Mónica Ojeda's Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, The Baffler, and Nashville Review. She lives in North Carolina.

"In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, in obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter - from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex - streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her inferiority, a link to memories and sensations - until its abrupt absence changes. Provocative and raw, Blood red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray -or red - zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges, A subversive grappling with what it means to wield power over one's body, Blood Red revels in the narrator's autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale." -- Jacket flap.