Of Beasts and Fowls

Winner of the Spanish National Fiction Prize

Summer ends, the season changes, and Coro, an artist frightened off by what her own paintings may represent, gets in her car and drives for hours in the middle of the night until she chances upon Betania, an isolated house existing in a world of its own. It's an unfamiliar place inhabited exclusively by women who, strangely, all seem to know her.

Like adherents of an ancient cult, the women of Betania all dress the same, carry out strange rites and celebrations, and live alongside goats and innumerable dogs against a landscape dominated by an immense, imposing mountain that seems to block out the sunlight. Theirs is a hierarchical, closed, and restless universe where — as the other women tell her and despite her attempts to escape the area — Coro may finally discover what it means to be part of something.

A "Hotel California" of the human heart, Pilar Ad n's Of Beasts and Fowl is a novel about the things that we do without knowing why, but that have an explanation that perhaps we will some day come to understand.

"Pilar Adón's writing...[is] literature in its purest form, and the novel Of Beasts and Fowls only confirms it." José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural

"A novel like Of Beasts and Fowls is a book that everyone who loves literature should read." Carlos Pardo, Babelia

"Fascination and unease are the feelings that dominate the reader of this splendid novel in which the writer plunges us back into her particular universe." Juan Marqués, Reading

Pilar Adón was born in Madrid in 1971 and is the author of four novels, including The Mayflies (forthcoming from Open Letter), several short story collection, and four volumes of poetry. She received the Ojo Critico Prize for Viajes inocentes, and won the Premio Francisco Umbral al Libro del Año, Premio Cálamo, and the Premio de la Critica for Of Beasts and Fowls.

Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Full-length translations include works by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, and Katixa Agirre. Forthcoming translations include novels by Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 to translate Moreno's In Case We Lose Power, and was a finalist for the Spain-USA Prize for her translation of Katixa Agirre's Mothers Don't.