Already an acclaimed poet, with ten volumes of poetry to her name, Eva Baltasar's debut novel Permafrost received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France's 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. Boulder's English translation was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. The author lives a simple life with her wife and two daughters in a Catalonian village near the mountains.
Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Among her translations are Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández, for which she won a PEN/Heim award, as well as works by Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, and Geovani Martins. Her translation of Eva Baltasar's Boulder was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators' collective, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

"An adventure of grit and philosophy in the impeccable hands of Eva Baltasar, as a swashbuckler Dante escapes the city for provincial life, and therein, enters the darkness of her revelry and disgust for humanhood. Baltasar peels words from their worn usage, giving the reader language unbearably alive and pure. Another tour de force from one of the best writers of our generation." --Yelena Moskovich

"The title of the novel is a metaphor for the protagonist, who sees herself as a strong, powerful animal, capable of handling anything, although the author reminds us that mammoths were under threat from being hunted by the humans of the time." --Europapress

"One sensationalist way of describing Mamut would be to call it a ferocious and brutalist version of Thoreau." --Pere Antoni Pons

Praise for Eva Baltasar

"A powerful and very original author. I would love to adapt Boulder." --Pedro Almodóvar

"The experience of reading Permafrost is utterly unforgettable." --The New York Times

"The language of desire never stops vibrating off the page; Baltasar pans the mundane for gold, and offers those nuggets -- these morsels of intimacy -- in a way that grips and sates." --New York Times Book Review

"Boulder is a sensual, sexy and intense book. Eva Baltasar condenses the sensations and experiences of a dozen novels into just over a hundred pages of vibrant prose. An incisive story of queer love and motherhood, it dissects the dilemmas of trading independence for intimacy." --Leïla Slimani, member and president of the 2023 International Booker Prize Jury

"Exquisite, dark and unconventional, Eva Baltasar turns intimacy into a wild adventure." --Fernanda Melchor


"Baltasar summons the joyous eroticism of words and reading." --The Guardian

"Through such intricate writing the author deftly manages to elevate the idea of a relationship to a force of nature, with the character of Boulder representing the struggle to reconcile a desire to be alone with a desire for company." --Times Literary Supplement

"Baltasar handles feelings like radioactive material, like something that kills us and illuminates us." --Babelia / El País

"Baltasar is a skilful writer. A Catalan Dorothy Parker. Ironic, relentless." --La Repubblica

"A magma of sensations, doubts and aspirations . A treasure." --Le Monde

"A radical novel on themes with little consensus - (homosexuality, refusal of motherhood), 'Boulder' is a mineral text, like these isolated rocks in the middle of the landscape." --L'independant

"Everything has an air of immediacy, and at the same time one has the feeling that between sentence and sentence abysses open, ellipses that expand and ask the imagination of the reader to fill them. Boulder is a work of incandescent, volcanic brevity and density, full of phosphorescent metaphors." --Núvol

"A cold but burning lucidity, admirable, in its approach to detail." --El Cultural

"Eva Baltasar's is a free unrestrained voice. She describes how you didn't think it could be done." --La Vanguardia

"Hers is a poetic subjectivity that looks at the world and discovers that everything that contains us can be looked at for the first time." --Gabriela Wiener

Publisher: And Other Stories

Pub date: 2024-08-06

Length: 144 pages