couple of months ago the wonderful @charcopress kindly gifted me Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz, and I read it in April without realising that it, along with Die, My Love and a third book as yet untranslated were intended as a sort of unofficial trilogy by the author. So really I should technically have read Die, My Love first! I finally got around to buying that one for myself for my birthday at the end of May and read it this month. To say that both books are disturbing would frankly be an understatement.

Both books focus on mothers, and I assume the third one will too. Die, My Love features a fairly new mother who is struggling with severe depression, exacerbated by her new role in life. She feels like she's losing her identity, and as the book progresses, making heavy and intense use of stream of consciousness, her fantasies about harming herself and others become ever darker.

Although I couldn't say I 'enjoyed' reading either of these books, I definitely appreciated them. Harwicz pushes boundaries and explores the extremities of mother-daughter relationships. The translations from Charco are, as ever, impeccable. Carolina Orloff teams up with Annie McDermott for Feebleminded and Sarah Moses for Die, My love, both cases resulting in clear-cut, vicious prose which you can't help but devour even as you want to look away.

Ariana Harwicz is certainly a force to be reckoned with, and I look forward with trepidation to the translation of the third book in this brutal 'trilogy' of books!