Los jóvenes no pueden volver a casa
Mario Martz

SHORT STORIES | 2017 | 158 pages

A collection of nine stories that reads like a novel under constant construction where the authors are protagonists and witnesses to the final stronghold of post-war Central America: absences, exiles, and abandonments.

Protagonists without a home cross from one story to the next, living in between absence and the search for a family identity. An unknown child visits his father with his best friend. A father returns years after having abandoned his family. A foreign family arrives in Managua in hopes of finding their daughter who disappeared. An ex Sandinista guerrilla warrior on the brink of madness works as a criminal judge in a colonial city. Subtle stories united by a past—and, according to the writer Sergio Ramírez, “the price of that past for the characters in Mario’s stories is loneliness, maladjustment, strangeness when faced with a world that others changed for them and may have worsened when it comes to ethics. A subtle thread that weaves the stories together with cruel stitches.”
 

RIGHTS: spanish ANAMÁ EDICIONES

“A book filled with absences, a ‘poetics of loss, abandonment, darkness, violence’ that makes way for some light. Born in 1988, Martz wants to understand his peers: search for the poetics of his generation.”
— La Nación, Costa Rica
“Through his different narrative voices, Mario Martz brings the essential search of every human being—an identity—to the forefront.”
— Madeline Mendieta, La Zebra
“I read Los jóvenes no pueden volver a casa and loved it. These are moving stories, the way they’re stitched together announces a novel.”
— Horacio Castellanos Moya
“Mario writes with a firm pulse, with knowledge of the cause, as if he’s been doing it for years while still keeping his stories fresh. We have ourselves a writer for the long-haul.”
— Sergio Ramírez
“Nine stories by a writer born in 1988 in a Central America about to close a cycle of wars, migrations, the reestablishment of democracy, comings and goings. The protagonists of these stories are filled with absences, innocence, a lack of knowledge about their own countries or the other countries where they have had to build a home, vestiges of a war, open wounds, foreigners who settle in a ‘prosperous and peaceful’ region, inheritances charged with violence.”
— BBC Mundo