When I started my Read the World project a couple of years ago, everyone I mentioned it to had the same name on their lips for Argentina: "You've gotta read Mariana Enriquez."

Which, now that I'm finished with The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, strikes me as an ironic directive. I don't really feel like I *read* Enriquez's writing; it seems more like she read her culture's collective anxieties and remixed them, cranking the volume in scathing tones. That is to say, she's reading *us* - to filth. 

How do we treat children? What are they to us? What about women? What about that awful amalgamation of the two, the teenage girl? What about those on our fringes? What about those who are dead? What about those who maybe or may not be dead? What about those who are gone, regardless of their being alive or dead? What does it even mean, to be gone, to teeter on the edge of society until you fall off? 

These are fraught questions (to say the least), and Enriquez isn't here to answer them. She will, though, make you confront every disquieting, uncomfortable inch of them. 

The thing that really stands out to me about Enriquez's writing is that she grabs what feels like a random detail and skips across its tangential edges into her story. While I think that looking deeper, these inductions have more connective tissue to their stories than meets the eye, I can't help but be impressed with their surface-level function; they're grounding. They flesh out a believeable shape of a world in a few sentences. It's a masterclass in scene setting. 

My favorite stories: "The Well," "The Lookout," "Meat," "Kids Who Come Back," and "Back When We Talked to the Dead."