Aside from his two forays into the novel, Rescue distance (2014) y Kentucky (2018), Samanta Schweblin is, above all, a masterful storyteller, influenced by the fantastic River Plate works of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Julio Cortázar, but also by the tradition of American dirty realism, from Raymond Carver to Amy Hempel. The 48-year-old Argentine writer, winner of the first Aena Prize for Hispanic American Fiction with her book of stories The good evilpublished at the beginning of 2025, claimed it when collecting the award this Wednesday, when she celebrated the recognition of a short story author in an ecosystem that usually reserves its highest honors for the novel. “Those of us who write stories run half lame,” said Schweblin in Barcelona, while thanking that the award distinguished “the exception” and not the rule.
Over the years, Schweblin’s stories have become longer, as evident The good evil. The author assures that in this book she has managed to lower the “volume of anxiety” when writing, which used to lead her to privilege the brief. “There is something about the storyteller that is naturally anxious,” he told us in mid-March, during an interview in Berlin. “Why waste time on 250 pages when I can tell this story in 20?” For Schweblin, furthermore, the short story has a specific power compared to the novel. “The story brings with it a kind of portal. One finds oneself in one’s living room and a second later one is in a park in Paris or in the mountains in the south of Argentina. The story can leave us upside down in the same reality in which we were five minutes ago. In the storyteller there is a desire to accompany the reader in that shock”.
His stories are different from each other, but they tend to share recognizable features: a constant intersection between everyday life and strangeness, sustained tension, dry humor, and a moment of abrupt turn—a fatal accident, an unexpected conflict, a crisis of lucidity—in which the characters cross a symbolic threshold. Told with an omniscient and distant voice, crossed by broken dialogues, they abound in stories of fathers and mothers, of sons and daughters, in which the notion of the family as a safe or benign space is called into question. They talk about grief, guilt and the ambiguity of human bonds. This is a selection of seven of his best stories.
Towards the cheerful civilization of the Capital (2002)
The story that opened The core of the riotSchweblin’s first book of stories, already contained some of the keys to his later work. A man arrives at a lost station with the intention of returning to the Capital, but an obstacle prevents him from buying the ticket and continuing his trip, leaving him trapped in a rural space where the disturbing reigns. The ticket taker and his wife offer him food, shelter and a privileged place in a false family made up of other travelers who have also been detained in the place. Schweblin turns this borderline fantastical situation into a fable about how power is not always exercised through violence, but through affection and protection. An allegory of what the family is, which in your stories appears as a place of tenderness, but also of control? The final escape will not make much sense either: both staying and leaving become chimeras. “A final sensation, common to everyone, is one of horror: sensing that when you arrive at your destination there will be nothing,” writes Schweblin.
Birds in the mouth (2009)
“You eat live birds, Sara,” says the father. “Yes, dad,” his teenage daughter responds, her mouth, nose and hands stained with blood. This is how one of her best-known stories begins, which gave the title to her 2009 book of stories: Sara takes a sparrow out of a cage in the dining room of her house and proceeds to swallow it. Unable to continue living with the horror that this monstrous habit causes, her mother decides to send her to her father, whom she divorced years ago, to take care of her. The story then follows the bewilderment of this man, who observes his daughter with a mixture of repulsion and compassion. Sara remains his daughter, a monstrous creature but also obedient and vulnerable, in whose strangeness an elemental need for love persists. In the end, this perplexed father has no choice but to accept and accompany his daughter. The story follows a usual procedure in Schweblin: a fantastic situation narrated with absolute naturalness, until, in the middle of this artifice, a truth appears, in this case crossed by an unexpected tenderness.
A man without luck (2012)
In this story, first published in 2012 and later integrated into Seven empty houses (2015), the narrator remembers the day of her eighth birthday, when she had to accompany her parents to the hospital after her sister drank bleach. In the midst of panic, the girl loses her coat and is abandoned in a waiting room. There an unknown man approaches her, who senses her discomfort and offers to accompany her to buy another jacket. When they return, the adults interpret the scene as a possible abuse or kidnapping and pounce on the guy. The girl, on the other hand, will retain an ambiguous and decisive memory of him. Schweblin narrates here one of those strange encounters between adults and children that will reappear in his work, as happens in a couple of stories by The good evil. A psychoanalytic dimension that is very typical of the author also appears: while all the parents’ attention is concentrated on Abi, who the author tells us from the beginning is the younger sister, the protagonist lives a foundational experience of abandonment, displaced by that figure that comes to replace her at the center of family affection.
None of all this (2015)
In the story that begins Seven empty houses —a book dedicated, not by chance, to her parents—a daughter accompanies her mother on one of her usual excursions through residential neighborhoods to look at other people’s houses. They do not seek to buy or rent: they limit themselves to observing from a distance that world of impeccable gardens and coveted objects, which the mother contemplates with a mixture of fascination and social resentment. When the car gets stuck in the mud, the situation escalates: the mother pretends to be unwell, manages to enter a house, searches its rooms greedily and steals a sugar bowl that had belonged to the owner’s mother. When she later appears at their modest house to claim it, the daughter asks her to look for it herself, in a gesture of sadism that seeks to see the rich humiliated. The story is inspired by the Hurlingham of his childhood, the Buenos Aires suburb where he grew up, divided between the lavish mansions and the poverty of the suburbs.
My parents and my children (2015)
In this story included in Seven empty housesan separated man gathers at a vacation home with his children and elderly parents, whose erratic behavior suggests some form of dementia. The situation boils over: one day, the children disappear along with their grandparents. The search leads to panic, until the protagonist ends up finding the grandparents and their grandchildren together, naked and happy, engaged in an innocent game. Schweblin here contrasts the desire for control of the adult world with a form of freedom that appears in childhood, but also in old age. The author says she was inspired by her grandmother. “I remember when she became old, in her 80s, and she told me: ‘This is fascinating, everything is forgiven’. She asked the most handsome people in the supermarket to hand her things from above, and while they grabbed the package she tickled their ribs. Everyone laughed. There is a very great freedom, it seems to me, in old age,” says the author. Between childhood and the end of life, there remain only “little normative adults, crushed by what we should be and do.”
Welcome to the community (2025)
The story with which it starts The good evil It opens with an extreme scene: a woman ties an anvil made of stones to her waist and sinks into a lake with the intention of dying. When the attempt fails, she returns home, collects the farewell letters she had prepared and resumes her routine with her husband and daughters, as if nothing had happened. What follows is the story of a woman who, unable to return to life, seeks a brutal way to tie herself to the world by causing harm and causing pain. Schweblin thus turns a suicide attempt into a story of survival and condenses the central theme of the book: that “good evil” that bursts into life and shakes it in such a way that it forces us to ask ourselves who one wants to be after the blow. “How many times do they come to hurt us and suddenly that wakes you up and changes the priorities of your life and turns you into another person, someone stronger, more intelligent and sharper,” explains the author. “Sometimes evil comes in and leaves you in such a state of shock that, for the first time in a long time, you are paying attention.”
The eye in the throat (2025)
In this other story included in The good evila domestic accident forever marks the life of a family: the two-year-old son swallows a button battery and the lithium ends up burning his throat, forcing him to live with a tracheotomy ever since. The center of the story is not so much that irreparable injury as the wound that opens between father and son. The parent, who was in charge of the child, is devastated by guilt, unable to approach him as naturally as before. Everything is articulated around a mystery, manifested in silent calls and in the memory of a strange disappearance at a service station (with a new encounter between a child and an unknown adult), which will only be resolved many years later. When the father dies, the son puts his fingers in that cavity in his throat. “So, if I put a finger in that hole that is mine but hurts in the body of another, and I poke, and push, what I am touching inside, is it my father?”, writes Schweblin in one of those devastating passages that are already a healthy habit in his work.