Between witches, angels and modern centaurs, the writer Gabriela Fonseca (Mexico City, 1966) crosses the oceans of fantastic literature to take her readers to places like the Museum of Invisible Arts, among other disturbing places that she knows and portrays perfection in her new storybook Centaur skin and death.

Published by Ediciones Periféricas, the eight texts that make up this work promise the evocation of the impossible in order to become poetrysays his colleague Ricardo Chávez Castañeda on the back cover.

In interview with The Day, the author, who has forged her pen through her two passions, journalism and literature, explained that these stories reflect painful experiences overcome, that I am no longer carrying, that now I try to make them something entertaining and aesthetic. I don’t want to say that I am passing my burden to the readers; it is only sharing it in a tasty way, distilled in literature; That is why I rescue the sense of humor, the ideal vehicle for pain.

We live between reality and fantasy

The author points out that the fantastic genre was given to her naturally, since since she was a child she has never been very good at differentiating reality from fantasy. As a child she read a lot, she recalls, “but no one accompanied me, so she made no distinctions, for me everything she read was real, fairies, goblins and mythological beings. Also, they let me read the newspaper; I ever read about a murder and then I thought: ‘What fools! Don’t they know that if they put the suspect next to the corpse and the corpse bleeds again, then that is the culprit?’ It happens that I had read that in Los nibelungos. Until a long time later I began to understand.

However, I am convinced that we live half in reality and half in fantasy, because our plans, wishes, hopes and projects are fantasy, not to mention everything we dream and remember. Memory and recollection transform all that into stories.

centaur skin and death, third book of short stories by Fonseca, who has also written three novels (Dead weight, Secrets of the sea and death y Trista’s Passion) is a selection of narratives that the writer defines as less staffcompared to his first books.

Developing more in the fantastic has helped me get away from my ego, from my person, from my direct experience, and take it to a more fantastic plane, less literal in terms of my experience. I feel that this is how I reach more readers, so that other people can identify and recognize themselves in what I write.Explain.

To polish her writing, Fonseca says that various literature workshops were very useful to her, first “to train me with criticism, and above all to know if what I write is being understood as I want it to be. The workshops are not occupational therapy or for them to tell me: ‘how beautiful it was’, but rather to know if what is being said in the texts is being understood, because the ideas of fiction are complex.

“I am very demanding with my stories. Only those that I think can form a whole and that represent me at this moment are what I choose to publish. I don’t like to throw away a collection with everything I’ve written, because maybe it doesn’t represent me or it doesn’t have cohesion.

On this occasion, the common thread is the pain of the human experience and the soul; I think that the latter is the great character that inhabits everythingthe author concludes.

the storybook centaur skin and death, by Gabriela Fonseca, can be purchased online at: