Join our monthly book club for a conversation about Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías's novel, Pink Slime, translated by Heather Cleary. Each discussion will be in two groups depending on attendance, and will include a raffle prize.

about Pink Slime

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.

"After Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream and Mariana Enríquez's Our Share of Night, Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías completes a triptych of extraordinary works that have come to us in the last decade from the Rio de la Plata area. Three very different novels that nonetheless share the force with which they look straight into the abyss, maintaining the lucidity necessary to focus on each revealing detail." —L’Indice

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.