Sabrina & Corina: Stories

Finalist, National Book Awards 2019 for Fiction

ISBN 9780525511298
One World / Penguin Random House
Kali Fajardo-Anstine. (Photo credit: Estevan Ruiz)
Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the author of the novel Woman of Light and the story collection Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, The Clark Prize, The Story Prize, the Saroyan International Prize, and winner of an American Book Award. More about this author >

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From the publisher:

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.

Judges Citation

In this perfectly-wrought debut collection by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, the center of the world is brown and it is female. Set within the contemporary Southwestern landscape, Sabrina & Corina insists from page one on radical complexity, showing us the girls who survive and those who don’t—all of them struggling to feel free and to be seen. Elegant, restrained, and insightful, this book heralds the emergence of a commanding new voice in American letters.

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