The Animal on the Rock

“Daniela Tarazona’s aesthetic appeals to the evocative power of literature. Magnificent, exacting, rich with emotion and meaning.” —Jury of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize 2022

"[The Animal on the Rock]seems to me to be one of the most original prose works of the Mexican century so far." —Christopher Domínguez Michael, El Universal

“I don’t think that there is now, in Mexico, a literary mind more original than Daniela Tarazona’s. Her books are as disconcerting as they are brilliant. Her ability to generate powerful, enigmatic images in the brains of her readers, dazzling.” —Álvaro Enrigue, author of You Dreamed of Empires

“The metamorphosis undertaken by Daniela Tarazona in The Animal on the Rock reaches its full form here, which, paradoxically, is not a form but rather its dissolution: a way of disappearing in words. The author has become writing. In her place, another woman who is pure language has left for an island with the intention of committing suicide. Or rather, a woman—the same, another, which one, none—has not left for an island... I happen to understand and not understand this book. But it is in what I do not understand where I can best experience its atrocious lucidity as a chill of beauty and truth.” —Luis Felipe Fabre, author of Recital of the Dark Verses

“This is a novel about the electricity that inhabits us, sometimes predictably, sometimes like a lightning storm in the brain. It is also about a writer’s relationship with her mother and about how fragile memory and language are. But above all it is about the terrible lucidity that comes with being abnormal, and how poetry is the only science that allows us to understand what someone with that lucidity sees.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Ten Planets

“After the death of her mother, a woman named Irma holes up on a faraway beach to grieve and, the process, undergoes a supernatural metamorphosis in the Mexican author’s latest.” —The Millions