Kit Schluter: photo by Claire Mullen

Kit Schluter

Kit Schluter (Boston, 1989) lives in Mexico City. His acclaimed translations from the French and Spanish include books by Olivia Tapiero, Anne Kawala, Jaime Sáenz, Michel Surya, and Marcel Schwob.

His Name Was Death

Fiction by Rafael Bernal

Translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter

With a contribution by Yuri Herrera

Never before in English, this legendary precursor to ecofiction turns the coming insect apocalypse on its head. A bitter drunk forsakes civilization and takes to the Mexican jungle, trapping animals, selling their pelts to buy liquor for colossal benders, and slowly rotting away in his fetid hut. His neighbors, a local Chiapas tribe, however, see something more in him than he does himself (dubbing him Wise Owl). When he falls deathly ill, a shaman named Black Ant saves his life—and, almost by chance, in driving out his fever, she exorcises the demon of alcoholism as well.…
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His Name Was Death is now finally available in English, in a fluid translation by Kit Schluter that preserves the tone and texture of the original.
—The Baffler, Max Pearl
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