Julia Sanches reads from Claudia Hernández's SLASH AND BURN (And Other Stories, 2021)

Through war and its aftermaths, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe.

As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake of the revolution.

Hernandez’ narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.

'An intensive reading experience . . . What Slash and Burn – named after a method of agriculture both destructive and regenerative – shows is the difficulty of creating a new life after war or other trauma.​​' - John Self,
The Guardian

‘A brilliant evocation of civil war and its bitter legacy.’ - Lucy Popescu,
The Observer

Claudia Hernández is the highly acclaimed author of five short-story collections and two novels, the first of which was Slash and Burn, published in Spanish in 2017 and in English in 2020. Her work has appeared in various anthologies in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Israel and the USA. She was the winner of the Anna Seghers Foundation award (2004), which acknowledges authors interested in making a more just and more humane society through their artistic production. The National Endowment for the Arts has supported the English translation of some of her books that explore the brutal impact of the El Salvadorian Civil War and she was named in Hay Festival’s Bogotá39 list of important Latin American authors.

Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. For And Other Stories she has translated from all three languages—from the Portuguese, Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques, from the Catalan the forthcoming Permafrost by Eva Baltasar, and from the Spanish, Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim award. She has also translated works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins, among others. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators’ collective, and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.