👯♂️ COVER ANNOUNCEMENT 👯♂️ We're pleased to share the cover of Aurora Venturini's masterful and acerbic forthcoming novel FRIENDS (translated by
@readinginbarsforeverafter ), designed by
@nlcputo !
FRIENDS goes on sale on 12/8 and is available to preorder now.
About the book 📚
In a breathless, incantatory voice, FRIENDS tells the story of Yuna Riglos, a celebrated Argentine painter nearing the end of her life. From her apartment in La Plata, Yuna writes as she paints: obsessively, associatively, driven by memory rather than chronology. Fame has not delivered peace. Instead, it has sharpened her awareness of what art cannot redeem.
At the center of the book is Antonella, a teenage girl from the slums who enters Yuna’s life as a housekeeper and becomes something far more unsettling: muse, double, survivor, and moral reckoning. As Yuna shelters Antonella from an unspeakable past of hunger, violence, and incest, the novel probes the uneasy ethics of care, authorship, and representation. What does it mean to protect another person—and what does it mean to turn their suffering into art?
Threaded through the narrative are spectral presences from Argentine and European culture—Pizarnik, Lautréamont, Dante, Goya—figures of genius and despair who haunt Yuna’s imagination as both warning and justification. Friendship, especially between women, emerges as both refuge and trap, most painfully embodied in the fate of Yuna’s fellow artist Matilde du Pin.
By turns savage, tender, comic, and horrifying, this is a novel about beauty and monstrosity, class and cruelty, the body as archive, and the terrible persistence of memory. FRIENDS asks whether art can offer salvation—or whether it merely gives shape to what cannot be forgiven or undone.
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