About the Author

Elvira Navarra was named by Granta magazine one of the "Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists" in 2010, and she was declared one of the major Spanish voices of the future by the magazine El Cultural in 2013. The author of five novels and short story collections, she has received numerous awards and honors for her work. Translated into French, Swiss, Italian, Turkish, and Arabic, Navarro lives in Barcelona.

Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, and her work has been shortlisted for a number of other prizes. Her translations of Daniel Saldaña París's novel Among Strange Victims (finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award), and Eduardo Rabasa's A Zero Sum Game both appeared in 2016. She has also published translations, articles and interviews on wide a variety of platforms, plus in three anthologies: México20, Lunatics, Lovers & Poets: Twelve stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare, and Crude Words: Contemporary Writing from Venezuela. She is now working on texts by Julián Herbert and Verónica Gerber Bicecci.

Reviews

"[A] brilliant mindbender...Navarro's exceptional novel defies easy interpretation, culminating in a breathtaking and surprising ending. The author is especially skilled at crafting the details and peculiarities of her two characters' psyches, and the result is a singular novel of art, friendship, and lunacy." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A novel of economic and psychological precarity and an exploration of the tension between the boundedness of art and the formlessness of life, A Working Woman is as charming as a fable and as frenzied as a fever dream." --Lit Hub"Thoroughly gripping." --World Literature Today"From the outrageous to the mundane, Navarro offers a good deal of good observation and invention." --Complete Review"This author's literary talent is a natural gift...the subtle, almost hidden, true avant-gardist of her generation." --Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac's Problem"Elvira Navarro is an enormously gifted and disturbing young writer with an unusual eye for the bizarre; she captures personal fragility with deceptively detached prose that stays with us like a scarring incision." --Lina Meruane, author of Seeing Red"A Working Woman invents a language and a structure to portray the outskirts of the city and job insecurity like no novel has done before. Elvira Navarro is one of the most intelligent and daring writers in the Spanish-speaking world." --Daniel Saldaña París, author of Among Strange Victims "Navarro is one of Spanish literature's most interesting contemporary writers....A Working Woman represents a major leap forward in her work." --Perfil