Catalina Infante Beovic is a Chilean writer, publisher, and co-owner of Librería Catalonia in Chile. She has written three books of stories of the indigenous peoples of Chile with Sonia Montecino, anthropologist and recipient of the Chilean National Social Sciences Award. She published her first book of short stories, Todas somos una misma sombraI, in 2018, followed by her English-language debut, Ferns. Published in 2020 by World Literature Today, Ferns was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and adapted into a short film by director Paz Ramírez. Infante's short stories and poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, the HarperCollins Daughters of Latin America anthology, and the Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations anthology. The Cracks We Bear is Infante Beovic's first full-length novel translated into English.

Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish-to-English
literary translator. In addition to her translation of Catalina Infante's debut
novel, The Cracks We Bear, her work appears in the anthologies Best
Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024) and Daughters of
Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023), as well as in venues such
World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today,
and Southwest Review. A former ALTA Travel Fellow, Michelle holds
an M.A. in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute and is
an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and the Bread
Loaf Translators' Conference.

Praise for The Cracks We Bear

"Catalina Infante's rich landscape of motherhood is brought to vivid life in Michelle Mirabella's deeply poetic translation. Not a word is wasted." -Anton Hur, judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize and author of Toward Eternity

"Chilean writer Infante's penetrating English-language debut centers on a woman coping with the challenges of new motherhood while reflecting on her late mother. While her baby daughter sleeps, Laura, who has postpartum depression, goes through a box of her mother Esther's memorabilia, "unsure of what it is I'm hoping to find." As the novel progresses, Laura attempts to understand who Esther was before her death from cancer when Laura was 18. Cold and emotionally distant, Esther left Laura with an emptiness that's "difficult to name... as if an organ has been removed from our bodies, leaving a hole in its place." Told in vignettes and fragments, the narrative alternates between Laura's distress in the early months of motherhood; trouble in her marriage to Felipe, which reaches a breaking point when she asks him to move out; and a vivid depiction of the turmoil following the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile as Laura pieces together memories from photographs. This slim and subtle work packs a stinging punch." --Publishers Weekly

"A Chilean woman loses her mother, gives birth to a daughter, and attempts to understand the fragile threads that bind generations in this slim yet sturdy novel. A straightforward voice guides a complex exploration of upheaval--political, maternal, and familial." --Kirkus Reviews

"Raw and incisive, Catalina Infante's The Cracks We Bear, translated from Spanish by Michelle Mirabella, is a story of mothers, daughters, and what each must bear forward from her past. Infante's unflinching writing, rendered by Mirabella with an exquisite sense of tension, is a tight-rope act of brutality and tenderness, grounded at all times by a fierce loyalty to what is real in motherhood. An absolutely vital English-language debut." --Ellene Glenn Moore, poet and award-winning author of Passage

"A piercing account of both motherhood and daughterhood in their ever-changing voracities and chiaroscuros. The Cracks We Bear vividly captures "a duplicity of the present or a simultaneity of all the presents" inhabited by narrator Laura as she struggles to reconfigure herself postpartum and to confront her own late mother. Mirabella's translation is keenly attuned to the pressures, losses, and longings moving through Infante's prose: a memorable debut from both writer and translator." --Robin Myers, poet and translator of A Father Is Born

"The Cracks We Bear is a beautiful work of memory and image craftsmanship. What does anyone know about being a mother? The book seems to scream at us. And there is no answer, only a woman's search in the face of the abyss of her motherhood. Behind this book lies a poetic and intimate truth: there are no complete stories, only pieces, fragments, and often the work of writing is not to reveal what is missing but to preserve it within the word as a secret." --Natalia Garcíiacute;a Freire, author of A Carnival of Atrocities

"Reflective, sensitive, and often moving, Catalina Infante&

Publisher: World Editions

Pub date: 2025-11-04

Length: 118 pages