Little Bird, Paperback

After moving from Peru north of the Arctic circle to begin graduate school, Claudia Ulloa Donoso began blogging about insomnia. Not hers, necessarily - the blog was never defined as fact or fiction. Her blog posts became the bones of Little Bird, short stories with a nod to fervent self-declaration of diary entries and the hallucinatory haze of sleeplessness. Blending narration and personal experience, the stories in Little Bird stretch reality, a sharp-shooting combination of George Saunders and Samanta Schweblin. Characters real and unreal, seductive, shape-changing, and baffling come together in smooth prose that, ultimately, defies fact and fiction.

About author(s):

Claudia Ulloa Donoso has been recognized by critics and readers as one of the most original and surprising voices in Peruvian literature. In 2017, she was included in the Bogata39, a list of the best Latin American fiction writers under 40 that also includes Valeria Luiselli, Juan Cardenas, and fellow Deep Vellum author Eduardo Rabasa. She currently lives north of the Arctic circle in Bødo, Norway, where she teaches Spanish and Norwegian.

Lily Meyer is a writer and translator from Washington, D.C. She is a regular reviewer for NPR Books, and her criticism appears online in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Poetry Foundation, Public Books, and more. Lily is a PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Cincinnati. She is a two-time fiction grant recipient from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and won the Sewanee Review Fiction Contest in 2018.