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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

SABRINA & CORINA

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Stories

SABRINA AND CORINA is a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.
The unlikely heroines in these pages are indigenous Latina women, who up until now have rarely ever been given their time in the spotlight. Set against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado - a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite - these women navigate the land the way they navigate their own lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

Sabrina and Corina draws from the author's own Southern Colorado heritage and life experiences living all over the Midwest and West of the United States. Kali describes herself and her characters as Chicana - with an origin ancestry of Pueblo Native American. It is eye-opening and fascinating to see these people through her eyes and words: historically, her characters come from a triple-colonized Southwestern U.S. that went from indigenous sovereignty to Spanish rule, then Mexican rule, and eventually the U.S. The subsequent intermingling of the indigenous culture with its European, Filipino, and ultimately Anglo American counterparts has led to a unique and complicated culture in New Mexico and Colorado that is so beautifully rendered in these pages. Race in the Southwest, particularly among Chicanos, is distorted and unclear but retains a deep connection to land and native ancestry. Kali's stories deliberately stay unclear on racial signifiers as a result - she wants her readers to experience the confusion and hybridity that is part of the Chicana experience.

In "Sugar Babies," ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth, but have the tendency to ascend during land disputes. In the title story, a family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual. "Any Further West" follows a mother who is a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In "Tomi," the character Cole returns home from prison, finding herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of her former childhood home. SABRINA AND CORINA is a moving - yet intensely readable - exploration on the universal experiences, by a rising star.

Kali's stories have appeared in several literary journals, and she holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming. She has been working for over a decade on her craft attending residencies at Yaddo (where she was the 2017 recipient of The LeSage-Fullilove Residency), Hedgebrook, and Hub City Press. For her novel-in-progress, she was awarded the 2017 Laura Hruska Fellowship through Soho Press. She counts among her mentors writers like Mat Johnson, Anne Beattie and Junot Diaz. She is based in Denver, Colorado.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-04-07 by One World

Book

Published 2019-04-07 by One World

Comments

In Kali Fajardo-Anstine's debut story collection Sabrina & Corina we find a different narrative of the West. These are women who inhabit a space between the Indigenous and the Latinx, they are fierce [and] powerful in their own way. Read more...

[An] engrossing collection of tales.Stories that bravely reinvent the Wild West narrative by lifting up Latinx women and portraying callused hand cowboys not as heroes, but as villains and perpetrators of violence.

Eleven achingly realistic stories set in Denver and southern Colorado bear witness to the lives of Latina women of Indigenous descent trying to survive generations of poverty, racism, addiction, and violence. Fajardo-Anstine writes with a keen understanding of the power of love even when it's shot through with imperfections.Fajardo-Anstine takes aim at our country's social injustices and ills without succumbing to pessimism. The result is a nearly perfect collection of stories that is emotionally wrenching but never without glimmers of resistance and hope.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine writes about hard truths in women's lives so knowingly, and with such a deft touch, I felt hyper-alert, as well as implicated and imperiled. The book is about belief, coping, yearning, and proceeding in spite of adversity (that is, the times we stay alive). The final act of the first story tells us everything we need to know about what territory we'll be entering: in these achingly convincing stories, the writer is writing delicately, symbolically, about mortality, itself.

A terrific collection of storiesfiercely and beautifully made.

Each story showcases Fajardo-Anstine's mastery of prose and the vulnerability of her characters. A timely classic in the making, Sabrina & Corina is a crucial read.

Fierce and essential stories.In the title story, a cosmetician prepares her cousin's body for burial while tracing her descent into the grave alongside the decline of their friendship. They had once been so close they had argued about which of them had actually felt the pain of a bee sting in their shared earliest memory. As teenagers they had studied their reflections in the full-length mirrors hanging on the four walls of their grandmother's bathroom... The image of the two girls observing themselves in their grandmother's mirrors, and hoping to emerge somehow as women in control of how the world perceives them, would seem to represent the feminine agency, legacy and kinship that govern the hearts of every character in this book. Read more...

Fajardo-Anstine's prose blossoms on the page; her scenes and characters develop so vividly that they're likely to leave an impression lasting long after you stop reading. Read more...

SABRINA AND CORINA is shortlisted for the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Shortlist Read more...

These stories, set in Colorado, will crush your little heart. And still you won't want to turn away. Fajardo-Anstine's work is gorgeous, and I found characters who, like the women in my family, heal with roots, don't believe in coincidence, and pray in many languages. Their lives are complicated and messy and the love and tenderness between the women in these stories are a clear reflection of the love and tenderness Fajardo-Anstine put into this fine piece of work. Read more...

In Fajardo-Anstine's beautiful debut collection, set largely in Denver, CO, she dexterously explores what it means to be Latina, indigenous, and female in ways both touching and powerful... These stories are stirring meditations on the lives of Latinas of indigenous ancestry; Fajardo-Anstine's collection is vividly alive with the love and pain of its characters, while echoing with the spiritual power of their pasts.

SABRINA & CORINA was named a most-anticipated book of the year by: B&N Reads, The Millions, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, REMEZCLA, FIERCE BY MITÚ, BOOKS ARE MAGIC, and more...

These stories blaze like wildfires. I was so happy to meet these characters. They made me laugh and they broke my heart. They were believable in everything they said and did. Women who were here before America was America. How tragic that American letters hasn't met these women of the West before, and how tragic that these women haven't seen themselves in the pages of American lit before. Thank you for honoring the lives of these working women, Kali. I welcome them and you.

In the 11 stories of Sabrina & Corina, Fajardo-Anstine writes a love letter to the Chicanas of her homeland - women as unbreakable as the mountains that run through Colorado and as resilient as the arid deserts that surround it... In her fierce, bold stories, these women - and she - are seen, and heard, and made known; the collection is both a product of pain and a celebration of survival... Like the woman on Sabrina & Corina's cover, the hearts of these characters are exposed but intact. Fajardo-Anstine's heart is there on the page, too, beating with the blood of her ancestors.

It was announced yesterday that Kali Fajardo-Anstine has won the American Academy of Arts Addison M. Metcalf Award. This award honors a young writer or artist of great promise, along with a $10,000 prize. Candidates are nominated by the Academy. Previous winners have included such writers as Jhumpa Lahiri, Dave Eggers, and Claire Messud. Read more...

SABRINA & CORINA, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, is a National Book Award finalist! Read more...

Italian: Racconti ; Japanese: Shinchosha ; Spanish: Muniscula ; Turkish: Ithaki

original story "The Yellow Ranch," published as part of the Sunday Shorts feature Read more...

...masterful storytelling... Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer... She is her own unique voice, and her work will easily find a place, not just in Latinx literature, but in American literature and beyond. Can you see me? I'm giving this collection a standing ovation! Can you hear me? I'm calling out Brava! Brava! to Kali Fajardo-Anstine from a new fan and aficionada of her work.

'Sabrina & Corina' Author Reflects on Redefining the American West Read more...

SABRINA & CORINA is the WINNER of the 30th Annual MPIBA Reading the West Fiction Award

This is the one I've been waiting for. Kali Fajardo-Anstine is extraordinary - Sabrina and Corina is deep, startling and not to be missed.

featured in Best Audiobooks roundup: Given how quickly short stories shift from one tone to another, a collection read by multiple narrators with both skill and sensitivity can seem like a tricky feat to pull off. But Kali Fajardo-Anstine's astounding collection of stories about Indigenous Latina women laid the ground for an incredible performance, and the cast behind this audiobook did not take the mission lightly. This is an essential listen, not an easy one, but you'll thank yourself later for pressing play. Read more...

Latina and Indigenous American women who long to be seen - and see themselves - are the beating heart of the stories in Fajardo-Anstine's rich and radiant debut..Sharing her characters' southern Colorado homelands, Fajardo-Anstine imbues her stories with a strong sense of place and the infinite unseen generations that coexist in even single moments.

A powerful, passionate collection of stories centered on the experience of Latina women in the Southwest. Fajardo-Anstine's voice is fresh and unstinting, her vision complex and bold. An important, delightful, dazzling debut.

I haven't had time to read many collections this year, but I've found time to read and re-read Sabrina & Corina, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. It is a beautiful, masterfully written collection of multi-generational stories featuring Chicana characters in Colorado, and each story reads like the best chapter of a novel - I love when I can say that about a work of art that is so committed to the humanity, culture, and familial love of a people to whom dominant narratives have often spoken over. Read this book.

Fajardo-Anstine's gritty and tender debut gives voice to so many women whose stories are rarely heard, and that's another way the book's title functions - to announce upfront whose stories these are.

Sabrina and Corina is captivating, bold, and beautiful. There's a world here, and you'll feel privileged to peer inside. This is a literary debut that kicks in the door. Kali Fajardo-Anstine is a badass.

You will clutch your heart reading Kali Fajardo-Anstine's short story collection. Her stories are that heartbreaking, each one like a gift from a small child, offered with earnest, luminous eyes, innocence itself, impossible to reject... go find yourself a copy of this thrilling, touching, beautiful book. Read more...

Powerhouse debut... stylistically superb, with crisp dialogue and unforgettable characters, Sabrina & Corina introduces an impressive new talent to American letters.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine Encourages You to Flout the Writing Rules - Ten questions about teaching writing with the author of National Book Award finalist "Sabrina & Corina"... Read more...