The protagonists of these seven stories are already defeated by their own messianism. They retrospectively recount the unjust circumstances that turned them into victims or criminals. The cast of antiheroes in Sacrifices includes a blind man, Tiresias, that seeks intimacy in a labyrinthic Mexico City; a dying pilot who finds solace reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on a beach in Biarritz; and a taxidermist painter who predicts various Venezuelan massacres in his own Guernica. These revelatory short stories tread the line between surrealism and realism, proving that fiction is always political. Despite the international settings, Blanco Calderón’s mythical characters are the product of a Venezuelan legacy of martyrs whose sacrifices failed to lead the country to democracy.

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“This novel is messy, exhilarating and hugely enjoyable. It is to the credit of Noel Hernández Gonzalez and Daniel Hahn that they engage so exuberantly with the technical and creative challenge of conveying such a linguistically imaginative novel into English.”– Rónán Hession, The Irish Times about The Night

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