Anyone who saw me reading Things We Lost in the Fire in public must have thought I was suffering and in deep pain. Every story in Mariana Enriquez’s debut collection had me grimacing and squirming, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. But her stories are so thoroughly transporting that I lacked the self-awareness to care. I was far away in Argentina, worried about the news of the decapitated child flashing across the television screen, and the one-armed girl who went missing in a haunted house, and on a murder tour of Buenos Aires. Enriquez’s stories all center around life in Argentina, often detailing the lives of disadvantaged youth. These stories are dark and unsettling, written so beautifully that the whole experience of reading them leaves you in a macabre trance. Argentina is a country that lends itself to ghost stories. Its past is a violent, dark one. For decades, the country was under a military dictatorship, and tens of thousands of people were killed or went missing during that time. Children were kidnapped and their mothers were taken by the regime. The shadow of the nation’s grim and relatively recent history looms heavily over the psyche of the stories in this collection. continue...