EBOOK
About
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 QUEEN SOFÍA SPANISH INSTITUTE TRANSLATION PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 BIG OTHER BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION
FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARDThis punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction.
Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing…
"Gorgeously labyrinthine." – Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." – Dizz Tate, author of Brutes
"Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." – James Greer, author of Bad Eminence
"Living Things turns out to be both highbrow and hair-raising (and exceptionally well translated by Julia Sanches). In only 120 pages it succeeds in several separate ways: as an eco-thriller exposing the horrors of industrialized meat production and agrochemicals; as a treatise on rendering truth in fiction; and, not least, as a "lads on tour" caper." – Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement
– Xiao Yue Shan, Cleveland Review of Books"Munir Hachemi is trying to tell this story of living things caught up in the gears of profit, of human hungers, of all the mechanisms of atrocity running in the background of our daily lives."
"Living Things doesn't try to shove anything down its readers' throats, though it places a lot at their doorstep and indirectly asks them to do some heavy lifting to understand it." – Nick Hilbourn, Rain Taxi
"As an essay on the antinomies of autofiction-and those of its foundation, the literary economy of "experience"-Living Things is wry and incisive." – Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson, Chicago Review
"Living Things is a slim, beguiling novel that belongs on a shelf alongside works by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira. It is both a serious meditation on art and modern food systems and a progressively mischievous exploration of form." – Literary Review of Canada
"Living Things is by turns cool and frantic, dissociated and visceral, and all the more unsettling for it. Animal cruelty becomes mundane, sandwiched between minutely rendered, lengthy and genuinely funny accounts of negotiations over where to sleep, what to eat, the everyday stuff of life." – Sadie Graham, The Toronto Star
"[U]pstart spirit infuses this short and spunky tale about young, would-be literary men who hit the road in search of adventure but find bleakness and exploitation ... Hachemi's documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go." – Rob Doyle, The New York Times
"Living Things is a socioeconomic critique of industrial agriculture, but can also be read as Cronenberg-style body horror. As a means of necessity, we are living things that eat other living things. It makes for tortured ethical decisions we will forever have to wrestle and understand. But we have
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 BIG OTHER BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION
FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION
WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARDThis punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction.
Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing…
"Gorgeously labyrinthine." – Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I've read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." – Dizz Tate, author of Brutes
"Living Things dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It's a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." – James Greer, author of Bad Eminence
"Living Things turns out to be both highbrow and hair-raising (and exceptionally well translated by Julia Sanches). In only 120 pages it succeeds in several separate ways: as an eco-thriller exposing the horrors of industrialized meat production and agrochemicals; as a treatise on rendering truth in fiction; and, not least, as a "lads on tour" caper." – Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement
– Xiao Yue Shan, Cleveland Review of Books"Munir Hachemi is trying to tell this story of living things caught up in the gears of profit, of human hungers, of all the mechanisms of atrocity running in the background of our daily lives."
"Living Things doesn't try to shove anything down its readers' throats, though it places a lot at their doorstep and indirectly asks them to do some heavy lifting to understand it." – Nick Hilbourn, Rain Taxi
"As an essay on the antinomies of autofiction-and those of its foundation, the literary economy of "experience"-Living Things is wry and incisive." – Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson, Chicago Review
"Living Things is a slim, beguiling novel that belongs on a shelf alongside works by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira. It is both a serious meditation on art and modern food systems and a progressively mischievous exploration of form." – Literary Review of Canada
"Living Things is by turns cool and frantic, dissociated and visceral, and all the more unsettling for it. Animal cruelty becomes mundane, sandwiched between minutely rendered, lengthy and genuinely funny accounts of negotiations over where to sleep, what to eat, the everyday stuff of life." – Sadie Graham, The Toronto Star
"[U]pstart spirit infuses this short and spunky tale about young, would-be literary men who hit the road in search of adventure but find bleakness and exploitation ... Hachemi's documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go." – Rob Doyle, The New York Times
"Living Things is a socioeconomic critique of industrial agriculture, but can also be read as Cronenberg-style body horror. As a means of necessity, we are living things that eat other living things. It makes for tortured ethical decisions we will forever have to wrestle and understand. But we have