Pink Slime: A Novel

by Fernanda Trías, Heather Cleary (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

As a sickness runs rampant through an unnamed city, one woman questions her unrecognizable world, the price of survival and what she owes to the people around her.

Longlisted for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature • Named a BEST BOOK of 2024 by NPR, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and ScreenRant • “The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you.” —Esquire

A hair-raising, poetic novel about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse.

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This vivid and unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668049785
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Fernanda Trías was born in Uruguay and is the award-winning author of three novels, two of which have been published in English. She is also the author of the short story collection No soñarás flores and the chapbook El regreso. A writer and instructor of creative writing, she holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She was awarded the National Uruguayan Literature Prize, The Critics’ Choice Award Bartolomé Hidalgo, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Prize in Mexico for her novel Pink Slime. Both The Rooftop and Pink Slime were awarded the British PEN Translates Award, and Pink Slime was chosen by The New York Times in Spanish as one of the ten best books of 2020. Translation rights for her work have been sold in fifteen languages. She currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she is a teacher at the creative writing MFA program of Instituto Caro y Cuervo. In 2017, she was selected as Writer-in-Residence at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, where she started writing her latest novel, Pink Slime.

Heather Cleary is based in New York and Mexico City. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction and has written about translation for publications such as LitHub, Two Lines, and Poets & Writers. Her other translations include María Ospina’s short story collection Variations on the Body, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (nominee, International Booker Prize), Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre (winner, Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize), Pink Slime by Fernanda Trias, and Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (both nominated for the National Book Award in Translation), as well as a selected works of Oliverio Girondo titled Poems to Read on a Streetcar. Cleary holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University and previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
When the fog rolled in, the port turned into a swamp. Shadows fell across the plaza, filtering between the trees and leaving the long marks of their fingers on all they touched. Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too. If I didn’t have Mauro, I’d spend all day wandering around, guided through the fog by the neon sign flickering in the distance: PAL CE HOTE. The missing letters hadn’t changed, though it wasn’t a hotel anymore; like so many other buildings in the city, it had been taken over by squatters. What day was that? Sometimes I can still hear the neon, its electric hum and the crackle of another letter on the verge of shorting out. The squatters kept the sign lit, but not out of laziness or nostalgia. They did it to remind themselves they were alive. That they could still do something arbitrary, something purely aesthetic. That they could still transform the landscape.

If I’m going to tell this story I should choose a starting point, begin somewhere. But where? I was never any good with beginnings. The day I saw the fish? Certain details leave their mark on time and render a moment unforgettable. It was cold, and the fog condensed into droplets on the overflowing dumpsters. I don’t know where all that garbage came from. It seemed to consume and excrete itself. And how do you know we’re not the waste? Max might have said something like that. I remember turning at the old corner store, with its windows boarded over, and how the greenish-red light of the hotel sign washed over me as I stepped onto the rambla.

Mauro would be back the next day, bringing with him another month of confinement and work. Cooking, cleaning, monitoring his every movement. Each time they came to collect him I spent a whole day catching up on the sleep he threatened or interrupted. This endless vigil was the reason Mauro’s parents paid me the exorbitant salary they knew would never compensate me. Breathing in the stale air of the port, prowling the streets, visiting my mother or Max—these were the luxuries I afforded myself on the days my time didn’t carry a price. If I was lucky, that is, and there was no wind.

The only people on the rambla were fishermen with the collars of their jackets pulled up around their ears, their hands red and cracked. The water stretched wide in all directions, an estuary where the river became a shoreless sea. The fog blurred the horizon. It was ten o’clock or eleven or three under that flat, milky light. The algae floated nearby like bloodshot phlegm, but the fishermen seemed not to care. They rested their buckets next to their beach chairs, baited their hooks, and gathered the strength of their brittle arms to cast their lines as far as they could. I liked the sound of the reels spooling out: it reminded me of summers spent riding my bicycle in San Felipe, no brakes, knees angled high to avoid the pedals. That bicycle contained my whole childhood, just like those beaches that would later be cordoned off with yellow tape the wind would periodically destroy and a few policemen in face masks would rehang. KEEP OUT, it said. Why? You’d have to be crazy to want to go like that: infected, exposed to a nameless disease that didn’t even promise a speedy death.

Once, long before I married Max, I saw fog as dense as it was that day. It was in San Felipe, just before dawn, sometime in early December. I remember because the beach town was still empty, except for the few of us who had been summering there all our lives. Max and I walked slowly along the road, not looking at the black sand of the beach, accustomed to the rhythm of the breaking waves. That sound was like a watch to us, a certainty of all the summers to come. Unlike the tourists, we didn’t go to San Felipe to get away from it all. We went there to affirm the continuity of something. It was pitch-dark except for Max’s flashlight, but we knew the way. We stopped near the lookout, where lovers often hid, and leaned over the white wooden banisters. Max pointed his flashlight at the beach and through the fog we saw a swarming mass of crabs. The sand seemed to breathe, to swell like a sleeping beast. The crabs gleamed in their halo of light, they gushed from cracks in the boardwalk. Hundreds of them, tiny. What did Max say? I don’t remember. I think we were both shaken, as if we had just been alerted to the existence of something incomprehensible, something bigger than ourselves.

In winter along the rambla, though, there was no sign of so much as a mullet. The fishermen’s buckets were empty, their bait waiting useless in plastic bags. I sat down near a man wearing a Russian-style hat with earflaps. My hands trembled from the cold, but I didn’t do anything to still them. Unlike Max, I didn’t view a person’s will as independent from their body. This belief had led him to dedicate the last few years to extravagant experiments: purges, privations, weights hooked through his skin. The ecstasy of pain. The fasting organism is a single vast membrane, he would say, a thirsty plant left too long in the dark. Maybe. But Max was after something else: to separate himself from his body, that indomitable desire-generating machine, which knew neither conscience nor limits—repugnant but also innocent, pure.

The fisherman sensed I was looking at him. With my feet dangling over the water, my maskless face, and my backpack, which seemed to be loaded with stones, he must have thought I was another lost soul ready to jump into the river. Maybe my whole family was dead, admitted one by one to the critical care wing at Clinics, never to emerge. The water barely made a sound as it lapped against the seawall and the air was completely still. How long could this calm last? Every war had its cease-fires, even this one we fought unarmed.

The line suddenly tensed, and I watched the fisherman cinch and reel in until a small fish popped into the air. It arched weakly, but the glint off its silvery scales brought a smile to the man’s face. He grabbed it with his gloveless hand and removed the hook. No one could know what death and what miracle that animal held within it, and the two of us admired it accordingly. I expected the man to drop it into his bucket, even if just for a little while, but he threw it back immediately. It was so slight that it made no noise as it broke the surface. The last fish. One minute later and it would be far away, immune to the dense seaweed, to the death trap of algae and waste. The man turned to look at me, gesturing with his hand. This is the starting point I choose for my story, its false beginning. I could easily make an omen of it, justify it as a sign of things to come, but I won’t. That’s all: an hour like any other on a day like any other, except for the fish that soared through the air and fell back into the water.

Editorial Reviews

"An intimate, melancholic look at an ecologically ravaged future."—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic

“The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you.”—Esquire

"Elegantly translated...a well-imagined, often poetically beautiful plague story.”—Lydia Millet, New York Times

"Even if you're wary of reading a pandemic novel, give this one, by Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías, a chance... Trías conveys the horror of mass illness perfectly in this enormously unsettling, but surprisingly beautiful, novel."—Michael Schaub, NPR

"A compulsively readable work of climate fiction."—Polygon

"A knockout of a story."—Kirkus (starred review)

"Pink Slime is a dystopia all too near to us, in which human connections and sadness over the end matter more than any explanation of the fog and disease that shroud everything. Trías's writing, precise and poetic, turns this beautiful novel into a toxic dream, into a meditation on ruins, bodies, and solitude."—Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

"Like a faintly distorting mirror, Pink Slime reflects back to us the image of a dying world. In this country, abandoned by God and government, the only consolation is the compassion and silent heroism of a few human beings. With her meticulous prose and the painful lucidity characteristic of her work, Fernanda Trías immerses us in a dystopia that expands around us like a poisonous perfume."—Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born, short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize

"Like a nightmare, like an omen, like the lines of an exquisite poem, Pink Slime echoes in my memory long after I read it. A book has never been so relevant, necessary, painful, and simply splendid.”—Jazmina Barrera, author of Cross-Stitch

"Vivid... The novel captivates with its increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, and Trías keenly explores the resentments that fester within a mother-daughter relationship, a failing marriage, and childcare work. Readers will be gripped."—Pubilsher's Weekly (starred review)

"An eerily calm tale...told in a conversational yet purposely discomfiting future subjunctive tense... With her eerie and unnervingly probable plot, strong narrative voice, and focus on the small, beautiful moments of life amid disaster, Trias’s tale will continue to haunt readers long after they turn the final page."—Library Journal (starred review)

“A beautiful elegiac meditation on parenting – in this case, the deep connection between a mother and son."—Locus Magazine

International praise for Pink Slime

“This is not a dystopia, but a full-on, technicolor apocalypse... That we are in the company of someone who truly cares makes the horror all the more visceral.”—The Scotsman

"Powerful and beautifully written, this is a disturbing read, depicting a terrifyingly convincing near-future scenario. The reader shares the achingly sad narrator’s feelings as care-giver, daughter and ex-lover." —The Guardian

"Trías expertly encapsulates the relationship between mother and child, obligation and affection, and the conflation of fear with love."—Kill Your Darlings Magazine

"Latin American fantastika is in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. The latest of this string of exhilarating new books to find its way into English is Uruguayan novelist Fernanda Trias's Pink Slime."—The Saturday Paper

"It's a dystopic work worthy of JG Ballard, where even in hopelessness there remains a flickering shard of hope or resignation."—The Irish Times

"Precise, luminous, and powerful."—L'indipendente

“Fernanda Trías revisits the apocalyptic novel with subtlety and intelligence; not as a heroic epic of survival, but through intense emotions and a choice that must be made.”—LH magazine

"[In this] novel—which belongs to that category of books that don't leave you once you’ve finished reading but rather force you to think of them, to keep returning to them—the stubbornness upon which we all depend in order to save ourselves, those we love, and our environment begins to emerge."—La Stampa

"After Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream and Mariana Enríquez's Our Share of Night, Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías completes a triptych of extraordinary works that have come to us in the last decade from the Rio de la Plata area. Three very different novels that nonetheless share the force with which they look straight into the abyss, maintaining the lucidity necessary to focus on each revealing detail."—L’Indice

“Intoxicating.”—Lire

“Pink Slime, like all truly great novels, etches itself indelibly onto the sensitive plate of one’s mind.”—Transfuge

From the Publisher

★ 2024-05-17
A town is decimated by a horrifying epidemic in this dark novel.

The second novel by Uruguayan author Trías to be translated into English—following The Rooftop (2021)—begins with a suffocating sense of doom and doesn’t let up from there. The unnamed narrator, living in a port town in an unnamed country, describes the aftermath of a destructive algae bloom that’s choking the life out of the area: “Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too.” She recounts the early moments of the epidemic, when a massive fish kill gave an indication that something was wrong; the divers dispatched to investigate the cause all lost their lives to the disease, which causes its victims’ skin to peel from their bodies. The townspeople who have chosen to remain are forced to endure power outages and food shortages, with many only able to eat a processed food called “Meatrite”—the “pink slime” of the title. The narrator has regular contact with only three people: her mother, with whom she is engaged in an “eternal skirmish”; Max, her ex-husband, hospitalized and suffering from a chronic case of the disease; and Mauro, the boy she babysits, who has a syndrome that causes him to always be hungry. The narrator knows the situation isn’t going to improve anytime soon, and Trías captures her resigned dread perfectly. This is a stunningly dark novel, but a beautiful one; Trías’ prose and Cleary’s translation perfectly capture what it feels like to live in an epidemic: “It’s hard for me to describe time in confinement, because if anything characterized those periods it was the sensation of existing in a kind of non-time. We lived in a constant state of anticipation, but we weren’t waiting for anything in particular.” This is a knockout of a story.

Stunning writing makes this a startlingly powerful novel.

Kirkus Reviews