This debut collection by acclaimed translator Sarah Moses is rooted as much in sound and language as it is in story. The 75 tiny fictions that populate Strange Water are evocative soundscapes, seascapes, skyscapes, landscapes, often magical and mysterious, sometimes unsettling. Each story is rooted in a single sentence—a dream sentence, a mistake sentence, a sentence uttered when the speaker thought no one was listening—whose tendrils reach into unexpected places. Moses’s attention to the individual word and to sound is echoed in her attention to the physical presence of the line on the page. These compressed-to-bursting-point narratives—preoccupied with bad-mannered neighbours, misunderstandings, coincidences and serendipities, dream states, and subtropical climes—take place in constant movement: between languages, between homes, between continents.

Sarah Moses is a Canadian writer and literary translator from Spanish and French. Her translations include Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh and Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (Pushkin Press / Scribner, 2020 and 2023) and Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz (Charco Press, 2017), which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the Best Translated Book Award. With Tomás Downey, she co-translated Sos una sola persona (Socios Fundadores, 2020), a selection of poems by Stuart Ross. Forthcoming publications include Head in the Clouds by Rocío Araya (Elsewhere Editions), a co-translation of Julio Cortázar’s letters with Anne McLean (Archipelago Books) and The Place Where Birds Die, stories by Tomás Downey (Invisible Publishing). Sarah has written one chapbook of fictions in Spanish, as they say (Socios Fundadores, 2016), and one in English, Those Problems (Proper Tales Press, 2016). Strange Water is her first full-length collection. She lives in Buenos Aires and Toronto, where she’s from.

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