Pink Slime - by Fernanda Trías

About the Book

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford--a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows--even if staying means being left behind.

Book Synopsis

Longlisted for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature - Named a BEST BOOK of 2024 by NPR, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and ScreenRant - "The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you." --Esquire

A hair-raising, poetic novel about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse.

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford--a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows--even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator's resiliency. This vivid and unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge.

Review Quotes

"Evocative, dreamlike, and immersive, Pink Slime is unnervingly effective at depicting the class-divided reaction to disaster, the claustrophobia of a stilled city, and the way things might change, and change some more, and slowly become unlivable. The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you."--Esquire

"Effortlessly atmospheric...Trías here does a powerful job of capturing the faintly sweet stagnation of sentimentality and nostalgia that affects--and limits--us all."--Rector Magazine

"Brief and beautifully written...Somber and political, Trías paints a grim but fascinating portrait of a woman who must endure an unthinkable reality."--Variety

"Elegantly translated...a well-imagined, often poetically beautiful plague story."--The New York Times

"An intimate, melancholic look at an ecologically ravaged future."--Silvia Moreno-Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic

"A knockout of a story."--Kirkus (starred review)

"Pink Slime is a dystopia all too near to us, in which human connections and sadness over the end matter more than any explanation of the fog and disease that shroud everything. Trías's writing, precise and poetic, turns this beautiful novel into a toxic dream, into a meditation on ruins, bodies, and solitude."--Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

"Like a faintly distorting mirror, Pink Slime reflects back to us the image of a dying world. In this country, abandoned by God and government, the only consolation is the compassion and silent heroism of a few human beings. With her meticulous prose and the painful lucidity characteristic of her work, Fernanda Trías immerses us in a dystopia that expands around us like a poisonous perfume."--Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born, short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize

"Like a nightmare, like an omen, like the lines of an exquisite poem, Pink Slime echoes in my memory long after I read it. A book has never been so relevant, necessary, painful, and simply splendid."--Jazmina Barrera, author of Cross-Stitch

"Vivid... The novel captivates with its increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, and Trías keenly explores the resentments that fester within a mother-daughter relationship, a failing marriage, and childcare work. Readers will be gripped."--Pubilsher's Weekly (starred review)

"An eerily calm tale...told in a conversational yet purposely discomfiting future subjunctive tense... With her eerie and unnervingly probable plot, strong narrative voice, and focus on the small, beautiful moments of life amid disaster, Trias's tale will continue to haunt readers long after they turn the final page."--Library Journal (starred review)

"A beautiful elegiac meditation on parenting - in this case, the deep connection between a mother and son."--Locus Magazine

International praise for Pink Slime

"This is not a dystopia, but a full-on, technicolor apocalypse... That we are in the company of someone who truly cares makes the horror all the more visceral."--The Scotsman

"Powerful and beautifully written, this is a disturbing read, depicting a terrifyingly convincing near-future scenario. The reader shares the achingly sad narrator's feelings as care-giver, daughter and ex-lover." --The Guardian

"Trías expertly encapsulates the relationship between mother and child, obligation and affection, and the conflation of fear with love."--Kill Your Darlings Magazine

"Latin American fantastika is in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. The latest of this string of exhilarating new books to find its way into English is Uruguayan novelist Fernanda Trias's Pink Slime."--The Saturday Paper

"It's a dystopic work worthy of JG Ballard, where even in hopelessness there remains a flickering shard of hope or resignation."--The Irish Times

"Precise, luminous, and powerful."--L'indipendente

"Fernanda Trías revisits the apocalyptic novel with subtlety and intelligence; not as a heroic epic of survival, but through intense emotions and a choice that must be made."--LH magazine

"[In this] novel--which belongs to that category of books that don't leave you once you've finished reading but rather force you to think of them, to keep returning to them--the stubbornness upon which we all depend in order to save ourselves, those we love, and our environment begins to emerge."--La Stampa

"After Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream and Mariana Enríquez's Our Share of Night, Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías completes a triptych of extraordinary works that have come to us in the last decade from the Rio de la Plata area. Three very different novels that nonetheless share the force with which they look straight into the abyss, maintaining the lucidity necessary to focus on each revealing detail."--L'Indice

"Intoxicating."--Lire

"Pink Slime, like all truly great novels, etches itself indelibly onto the sensitive plate of one's mind."--Transfuge

About the Author

Fernanda Trías was born in Uruguay and is the award-winning author of three novels, two of which have been published in English. She is also the author of the short story collection No soñarás flores and the chapbook El regreso. A writer and instructor of creative writing, she holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She was awarded the National Uruguayan Literature Prize, The Critics' Choice Award Bartolomé Hidalgo, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Prize in Mexico for her novel Pink Slime. Both The Rooftop and Pink Slime were awarded the British PEN Translates Award, and Pink Slime was chosen by The New York Times in Spanish as one of the ten best books of 2020. Translation rights for her work have been sold in fifteen languages. She currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she is a teacher at the creative writing MFA program of Instituto Caro y Cuervo. In 2017, she was selected as Writer-in-Residence at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, where she started writing her latest novel, Pink Slime.

Heather Cleary is based in New York and Mexico City. Her writing has appeared in Two Lines, LitHub, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She is the author of The Translator's Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, about the power of translation to challenge norms of intellectual property and propriety. Her other translations include the novels Witches by Brenda Lozano, American Delirium by Betina González, Comemadre by Roque Larraquy, and The Planets, The Dark, and The Incompletes by Sergio Chejfec, as well as a selected works of Oliverio Girondo titled Poems to Read on a Streetcar. Cleary holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.