The Summer of the Serpent

A horror-infused, polyphonic work about the violence and cruelty seething in a late-70s Guadalajara neighborhood

At a traveling fair, a young girl visiting with her family will ask a “serpent woman” to tell her future. The serpent woman’s answer is cryptic, but back in their neighborhood, the lives of the girl and her sister will be haunted by a ghost and a boa as their world shimmers between the real and unreal.

The Summer of the Serpent gives us a multi-faceted, multi-textured look at the sisters, their family, and their neighbors caught in the strange intense forces afflicting the neighborhood throughout that summer, much of it seemingly related from 40 years later, in more or less our own present.

Cecilia Eudave lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, and teaches at the Universidad de Guadalajara. She is the author of the story collections Técnicamente humanos, En primera persona, and Registro de Imposibles, as well as another novel, Bestiaria vida, which won the Juan García Ponce Literary Award.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her translations have appeared in Granta, The Baffler, Kenyon Review, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry and among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). As a poet, Robin is the author of the forthcoming Centro. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2022, Guernica, The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Annulet Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and other journals. She is an alumna of the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Literary Translation Centre, the Community of Writers, and Under the Volcano.