Excerpt from Costalegre by Courtney Maum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Jack stood there with his bird face. Not everyone was there. Walter had long since stopped coming to meals with us, instead Mum had them trayed out to him, and I had only the sight of dirtied dishes to prove he wasn't dead. Caspar was in the bushes, trying to catch a certain insect whose name I have forgotten, but it has a bright blue back and teethed antennae, and he has been making photographs of these insects using only water, shade, and sun. Ferdinand had been there earlier, but he wasn't at that moment. He had taken to going on long walks across Teopa, gathering more rocks.

The group saw Jack. My mother threw her hand up in a wave, and Jack's body stayed uneasy, which made my mother laugh.

Konrad was there also, in a palm chair near the pool. White trousers, white shirt opened all the way to his navel, too thin, but not ashamed about it like he'd been before, his skin the kind of tan that no one else's turned. And hairless, like a boy.

"I'm not eating an orgy," Jack said. "You invited me to lunch."

"Oh, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk," said mother, rolling to her back. "You're tremendously late, you know." "Three of my cows got out. This weather." I watched him take his hat off. "If only it would rain." "More scorpions for us!" said Baldomero, peeling himself off Hetty. "I've quite a collection. You should see the guts. Have you seen their guts?" He made a sound as if he were choking. And then he produced a feather from the clutches of his cape and started tickling Hetty's toes.

"I'm not in the mood for this," said Jack. "Are we having lunch?"

His head turned in the direction of the galley kitchen behind the palapa, where the food came out. His face didn't change when he saw me, which made me feel foolish. Maria was probably not going to come out again, not till they rang the bell for lunch.

So I rose, even though I felt unwanted, and asked if I should fetch her. I wanted to say something, after all.

"Ha! She gets up for him! What about the rest of us? It's mutiny in the kitchen!" This was Baldomero, whose face was sweating now.

"Hallo, Heinrich," C. singsonged from the pool, where she was swimming slow laps backward, never hitting the side once.

I watched her arms cut through the water. I could see her armpits. I dared a look at Jack because she'd called him Heinrich.

"You truly are degenerates," is what Jack said.

"Oh please," said mother, pulling her skirt up to twirl her toes at him. "You used to be one too."

I want to tell the stories. The ones that can't be real. Here is a story that Magda used to tell me. Magda, she of the "Go to sleep, cariños" and the warm pieces of bread.

In the mountains there are women called the Ciguapa, naked except for their own manes. Their feet face backward, and the people who try to trap them lose their sanity sorting out which way their tracks travel. If you look a Ciguapa in the eye, you are eternally transfixed. Many travelers are transfixed on the mountains. They die of fear, and cold.

What if I held everything inside of me? What if you couldn't tell which way my tracks went?

Excerpted from Costalegre by Courtney Maum. Copyright © 2019 by Courtney Maum. Excerpted by permission of Tin House Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.