Mouthful of Birds

Mouthful of Birds is the English-language story collection from Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell from the 2009 Spanish collection Pájaros en la boca. Twenty stories move between Buenos Aires apartments, Patagonian roadside towns, and the kind of liminal Argentine spaces Schweblin's novella Fever Dream made famous. The title story is six pages about a father who walks into his ex-wife's home to find his teenage daughter eating a live bird, and it sits next to stories about abandoned brides, men who give birth to butterflies, and a town where children are sold as merchandise.