"Banca's stories are impactful, heartfelt, quintessentially human, and visceral with desperation, trauma, and, finally, compa?erismo/solidarity, and even hope." -- Sara Mart?nez, Booklist
"Banca's characters grab you by the heart and refuse to let you go. Visceral, unflinching, ferocious, unashamed--an important and much-needed entry to the world's literature." -- Jade Song, author of Chlorine
"From Savagery is an honest and delirious conversation between marginal and energetic characters, defeated but enthusiastic, ostracized but hopeful, crazed but determined to get ahead. Twelve round-trip stories, from here and from there, of a hybrid Spain diluted by deep (Latin) America. An everyday tragedy of drivers who make their living pedaling between Barcelona and Caracas in a relentless battle for survival. Through Nanda's eyes, Banca transforms Montju?c into El ?vila, La Rambla into Catia Boulevard, and Camp Nou into the Br?gido Iriarte stadium. In these wild pages, Banca stirs the emotional memory of the immigrant, and among the tears, uncertainties, and concerns for subsistence, she finds traces of hope and tenderness." -- Eduardo S?nchez Rugeles, author of The Lisbon Syndrome
"Because I know everything and don't know what to do with that information. At some point, I'll have to let it out and I'm afraid that it will be catastrophic. Alejandra Banca's From Savagery is an extraordinary homage to the everyday life of a migrant community that is learning how to laugh, cry, love, and fight in an elsewhere where every decision is difficult and all-consuming. Each story confronts us with the unbearable responsibility of accompanying characters whose journeys around streets that at times feel like home and at times feel like purgatory are marked by the stench of a corpse without a grave, the dampness of a bicycle seat stained with blood, and the salty taste of the sweat dripping from faces that get lost in the invisible crowd of the informal workers. In other words, the material traces of uprooted lives forever excluded from the spectacular stages of nation-defining epics. From Savagery asks that we hold these traces the way we would hold the broken pieces of the mirror that used to reflect and contain, as an impossibly coherent whole, what it meant to be Venezuelan, and find in the pain of the thousand cuts the determination to do more than just survive and to be more than just ruins. A beautiful, devastating, and absolutely essential masterpiece." --Irina R. Troconis, author of The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution
"Survival in the midst of the uncertainty of exile is the central theme of this book. The young people who try to survive in From Savagery depend on their bodies, always exposed, aching, exhausted. Bodies pushed to the limit, that find no respite in a city that chews them up and swallows them. And yet, joy permeates through the cracks where friendship thrives, to give way to luminous encounters and unexpected revelations. These stories force us to look at exile from its most vulnerable side: that of living from day to day, on the verge of collapse; that of the determination and stubbornness of making one's way in a foreign territory. Without guarantees, but also without rest. Because there is always the hope of return or, at least, the certainty that the future awaits us." --Raquel Rivas Rojas, Venezuelan researcher, writer, and translator
"From Savagery speaks to the indomitable, rebellious existences of the flowers in the garden of an uninhabited house. These realities are characterized by their savagery, pain, and beauty as they continue to blossom despite the difficult circumstances that have plagued Venezuela in the last two decades." --Andrea Sof?a Crespo Madrid, author of Tu?tano
