Pink Slime

Longlisted for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature • Named a BEST BOOK of 2024 by NPR, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and ScreenRant • “The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you.” —Esquire A hair-raising, poetic novel about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse. In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind. An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This vivid and unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge.

Fernanda Trías was born in Uruguay and is the award-winning author of three novels, two of which have been published in English. She is also the author of the short story collection No soñarás flores and the chapbook El regreso. A writer and instructor of creative writing, she holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She was awarded the National Uruguayan Literature Prize, The Critics’ Choice Award Bartolomé Hidalgo, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Prize in Mexico for her novel Pink Slime. Both The Rooftop and Pink Slime were awarded the British PEN Translates Award, and Pink Slime was chosen by The New York Times in Spanish as one of the ten best books of 2020. Translation rights for her work have been sold in fifteen languages. She currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she is a teacher at the creative writing MFA program of Instituto Caro y Cuervo. In 2017, she was selected as Writer-in-Residence at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, where she started writing her latest novel, Pink Slime. Heather Cleary is based in New York and Mexico City. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction and has written about translation for publications such as LitHub, Two Lines, and Poets & Writers. Her other translations include María Ospina’s short story collection Variations on the Body, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (nominee, International Booker Prize), Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (winner, Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize), Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias, and Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (both nominated for the National Book Award in Translation), as well as a selected works of Oliverio Girondo titled Poems to Read on a Streetcar. Cleary holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University and previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College.