something happens

Author: Stéphanie Chaillou

Translator: Laura Mullen

Publisher: Diálogos (2025)

Stéphanie Chaillou’s something happens is a haunted chamber work evoking fugitive psychic states rarely experienced on the page. It is a piece exquisite in its beauty—poignant and arresting in its dread and despair. A shadow world of childhood lived for a lifetime in intimations, now brought to English in a lucid and sensitive translation by Laura Mullen. There’s a terrible inevitability to the narrative as it obliquely works its way into our souls in unbidden, uncanny, indelible images and leads us to the place we sense we dare not go. 

—Carole Maso