SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 QUEEN SOFÍA SPANISH INSTITUTE TRANSLATION PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2024 BIG OTHER BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATION  FINALIST FOR THE CERCADOR PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION WINNER OF A 2023 PEN TRANSLATES AWARD This punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño’s  The Savage Detectives  and Samanta Schweblin’s  Fever Dream  heralds an exciting new voice in international fiction. Munir, G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid after graduation for a carefree summer of picking grapes in the south of France. But there's no grape harvest, and they end up in a series of increasingly nightmarish factory-farming gigs, where workers start disappearing. Soon the youngmen find themselves far away from the world of books and ideas, immersed in an existence that is lawless, inhumane and increasingly menacing… "Startling, compulsive, and vibrant;  Living Things  reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I’ve read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world." –  Dizz Tate, author of  Brutes " Living Things  dips blithely in and out of genres and packs more ideas in its lean frame than seems possible. It’s a novel posing as a journal posing as a meditation on the function of the journal that playfully interrogates form and content in art, what it means to write, and what it means to care or not care about anything, or about everything. Munir Hachemi is a magician, and his marvellous book, deftly translated by Julia Sanches, defies adequate description." –  James Greer, author of  Bad Eminence "Gorgeously labyrinthine." –  Molly McGhee, author of  Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind " Living Things turns out to be both highbrow and hair-raising (and exceptionally well translated by Julia Sanches). In only 120 pages it succeeds in several separate ways: as an eco-thriller exposing the horrors of industrialized meat production and agrochemicals; as a treatise on rendering truth in fiction; and, not least, as a “lads on tour” caper." – Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement "Munir Hachemi is trying to tell this story of living things caught up in the gears of profit, of human hungers, of all the mechanisms of atrocity running in the background of our daily lives." – Xiao Yue Shan, Cleveland Review of Books "Living Things doesn’t try to shove anything down its readers’ throats, though it places a lot at their doorstep and indirectly asks them to do some heavy lifting to understand it." – Nick Hilbourn, Rain Taxi "As an essay on the antinomies of autofiction—and those of its foundation, the literary economy of “experience”— Living Things is wry and incisive." – Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson, Chicago Review " Living Things is a slim, beguiling novel that belongs on a shelf alongside works by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira. It is both a serious meditation on art and modern food systems and a progressively mischievous exploration of form." – Literary Review of Canada "[U]pstart spirit infuses this short and spunky tale about young, would-be literary men who hit the road in search of adventure but find bleakness and exploitation ... Hachemi’s documentary-style accounts of low-paid factory labor compellingly take us where most fiction writers would rather not go."  – Rob Doyle, The New York Times " Living Things is by turns cool and frantic, dissociated and visceral, and all the more unsettling for it. Animal cruelty becomes mundane, sandwiched between minutely rendered, lengthy and genuinely funny accounts of negotiations over where to sleep, what to eat, the everyday stuff of life."  – Sadie Graham,  The Toronto Star " Living Things is a socioeconomic critique of industrial agriculture, but can also be read as Cronenberg-style body horror. As a means of necessity, we are living things that eat other living things. It makes for tortured ethical decisions we will forever have to wrestle and understand. But we have to eat, we have to ear a paycheck, despite the bio-ethical implications and consequences. Living Things wrestles with these questions, albeit in a way shot through with humor and personal conviction" – The Driftless Area Review “Told from journal entries and written almost as a survivor's tale,  Living Things  is filled to the brim with no fluff commentary on immigration, capitalism, and literature. Four college friends head down to the South of France to work on a grape farm for the summer, an idyllic situation for four men with no real post-grad ambition. But this facade comes crashing down very quickly after they arrive, and realize they will be working in nightmarish factory conditions amongst many other modern horrors. Coach House translations are always such a treat and veer on the absurd and experimental, and this novel takes the cake for them. An absolute feat in translated fiction!” –  Grace Sullivan, Fountain Books “Four freshly-graduated, young men travel to France to take on a grape-picking gig, but they find themselves involved in something far more horrifyi