by Catalina Infante (Author), Michelle Mirabella (Translator)

Best Books in Translation 2025 - Words Without Borders

"Chilean writer Infante's penetrating English-language debut centers on a woman coping with the challenges of new motherhood while reflecting on her late mother. This slim and subtle work packs a stinging punch."--Publishers Weekly

Motherhood is terrifying, thinks Laura, feeling small and helpless as she holds her newborn daughter. Instead of joy, she feels fear, and then anger at her own late mother for her absence. The Cracks We Bear opens as a story about new motherhood. Soon, however, it reveals itself to be an exploration of memory and trauma as Laura starts to recall her childhood in Chile. Born in exile to staunchly communist parents, she returns to Chile with her mother after the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the fledgling democracy she grows up in, topics of capitalism and communism are ever present. Laura's reflections, born from personal experience, are interwoven with raw and honest memories of her family life. Borrowing elements from the Bildungsroman, and pulling from the Latin American short story tradition, Catalina Infante recounts Laura's past in vignettes. Piece by piece, the short chapters come together like a reconstructed vase, bearing its cracks.

Author Biography

Catalina Infante Beovic is a Chilean writer, publisher, and co-owner of Librería Catalonia in Chile. She has written three books of stories of the indigenous peoples of Chile with Sonia Montecino, anthropologist and recipient of the Chilean National Social Sciences Award. She published her first book of short stories, Todas somos una misma sombraI, in 2018, followed by her English-language debut, Ferns. Published in 2020 by World Literature Today, Ferns was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and adapted into a short film by director Paz Ramírez. Infante's short stories and poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, the HarperCollins Daughters of Latin America anthology, and the Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations anthology. The Cracks We Bear is Infante Beovic's first full-length novel translated into English.

Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish-to-English
literary translator. In addition to her translation of Catalina Infante's debut
novel, The Cracks We Bear, her work appears in the anthologies Best
Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and Daughters of
Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023), as well as in venues such
World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today,
and Southwest Review. A former ALTA Travel Fellow, Michelle holds
an M.A. in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute and is
an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and the Bread
Loaf Translators' Conference.

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