An eerie mix of the familiar and unreal. Colanzi is intent on blending genres (horror, cyberpunk, literary fiction). Her reality is a warped one, shifting between a violent past and frightening future, where the heat and toxic radiation — and the babble of inner voices — combine to create a hallucinatory vision.
— Anderson Tepper, The New York Times
Introducing the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, You Glow in the Dark glimmers with an unearthly light and a nearly radioactive power
The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi’s writing—at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific—casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: Was that realistic or fantastic? Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation—the book’s stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there’s the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader’s attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent.
An eerie mix of the familiar and unreal. Colanzi is intent on blending genres (horror, cyberpunk, literary fiction). Her reality is a warped one, shifting between a violent past and frightening future, where the heat and toxic radiation — and the babble of inner voices — combine to create a hallucinatory vision.
— Anderson Tepper, The New York Times
Tinged with futuristic flourishes and set largely in the Bolivian Altiplano, these stories examine the aftermath of terrible trespasses, mostly only whispered about. The 'alien gaze' is a keen instrument for dissecting the human condition, and Colanzi employs it to great effect here.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)
A shimmering collection focused on the ruinous consequences of human folly… Taken together, these stories paint an arresting portrait of corruption, industrialization, the power of nature, and supernatural forces.
— Publishers Weekly (starred)
Places, molecules, and species sprawl and mutate; centuries-long retrospection, cyberpunk grit, first-person dream narrative, and religious fantasia fit together, simultaneously fabulist and real, vivified by Colanzi’s mysteriously lucid prose… In Colanzi’s writing, reality is grander and weirder than we imagined.
— Drew Zeiba, Los Angeles Review of Books
Liliana Colanzi won the International Ribera Del Duero Prize for You Glow in the Dark, further evincing the tremendous talent of this Bolivian writer whose fiction has opened up new spaces in our literature of the strange and the fantastic.
— Latin American Literature Today
A rare excellence: a capacity to combine the ambiguity of poetry with the clarity of a revelation.
— Carlos Pardo, El País
Perhaps the best thing about the collection are the coincidences that thread through it . . . the luminosity of the book resides in these encounters and synchronicities, like the blue light that shines from the contaminated people in the last story, the blue of death, but also of a star or the bottom of the ocean.
— Rosamaría Durán, Otra Parte
This slim story collection contains seven entries, each told in taut, sharp prose that will beguile, enthrall, and astound. … In 2017, Colanzi was named one of the 39 most promising Latin American writers under 39, and her talent and stature continue to grow.
— Diego Báez, Booklist
In [Colanzi’s] tales, violence is something in the air or soil, something ready to take us over or occupy our lives at any moment.
