By Gisela Heffes
Translated by Grady C. Wray
Crocodiles at Night follows the difficult journey of death and all it affects—family, memories, place—through the eyes of a woman as she travels between her home in Houston and her ailing father in Argentina.
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Paperback: 9781646053766
eBook: 9781646053896
Description
Although the outcome of Crocodiles at Night does not remain a surprise beyond the first paragraph, it expands outwards in philosophical, heartfelt reverberations true to Heffes's style. Crocodiles at Night explores familial ties, memories and images of places that are no longer the same, the vagaries of the medical system, and social critique in this unfeigned, excruciating view of death and how it affects all who experience it.
Biographical Information
Gisela Heffes is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Johns Hopkins University as well as a writer, ecocritic, and public intellectual with a particular focus on literature, media, and the environment in Latin America. She is the author of several novels, including Ischia (Deep Vellum, 2023). She currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Grady C. Wray has taught Latin American literature, Spanish, and Translation at the University of Oklahoma for over two decades. He published the first bilingual critical edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz' Devotional Exercises. Apart from his critical work on women writers of the pre-modern period, his translations of poetry and fiction include Ischia (Deep Vellum, 2023) and The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020) by Gisela Heffes; 2323 Stratford Ave. (2018) by Marcelo Rioseco; and Series 201 (2017) by Luisa Valenzuela.
Reviews
Praise for Crocodiles at Night
“A valuable, attractive, and interesting novel.” —Ana María Shua
“Recounting the death of a parent is by no means a new theme in literature. What is new is not only how it is told, or perhaps the reasons that led to the departure of that loved one, but the author’s expressive ability to convey the loss and the circumstances that occur once the parent is gone. That is exactly what Crocodiles at Night by Gisela Heffes does: the reader can look in the mirror of pain, see his or her own emotions reflected in the pages of a novel that tells the story of an essential loss.” —Rose Mary Salum
Praise for Gisela Heffes
“Heffes’s striking work brings the reader deep into her protagonist’s dark and roving imagination.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Ischia] asks us to consider the role that our own storytelling, and our own fantasies, play in our lives.” —Greg Walkin, Literal Magazine
“[D]eliberately digressive and often feverish novel . . .” —Kirkus Reviews
“Gisela Heffes’s work has been paramount in building bridges between ecocriticism and literary, artistic and scholarly responses to the rise of neo-extractivism, which rethink the agency of more-than-human existents and environmental justice. As the modern world-system’s first colonial margin, the region is host to a rich aesthetic and political archive of mourning and resurgence; Visualizing Loss in Latin America mobilizes it masterfully for a bio-ecocritical re-assessment of our planetary present.” —Jens Andermann, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University