A hallucinatory, innocent, fanciful and redemptive book. Cabezón Cámara’s historical fiction plays out like confession or revelation, a piece of real-unreal colonial apocrypha, glowing white hot, dancing like the heart of a pyre.

Haunting, powerful new historical fiction.

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s writing is singular in the Spanish language: an intrepid pulse that shakes and disarms us in the face of the wordless power, both formidable and innocent, of the jungle and the creatures it portrays.

Sensuous and searing—readers will be riveted by this queer anticolonial picaresque.

So sharp, so urgent, so brave. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is one of the most authentic voices writing in Spanish today, and among her many talents is one that’s especially hard to find: not only does she challenge and incite us, not only does she confront the darkness, but she also gives us in return the subversive courage to think of ourselves as more human, more alive, and more luminous than ever.

Cabezón Cámara’s third novel published in English, fluidly translated by Myers, is a polyphonic interpretation of the incomparable adventures of an enigmatic, seventeenth-century conquistador-esque figure whose chosen moniker was Antonio de Erauso—a seamless, fever-dreamy exposé of inhumane colonialism, religiosity, and genocide, revealing the extreme resilience necessary to claim selfhood outside expected, mandated norms.

She writes with the astuteness of an experienced researcher and the vivid rhythms of a poet. The worlds of her books are revealed to us through a playful, erotic, festive sense of curiosity, one that always leads us to good harbor.

If there's any writer strong enough to start a revolution, it's Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. And I'll be right there beside her.

Cabezón Cámara returns to her readers with all the strength and talent we expect from her, but she also arrives with something new, a tenderness that hadn’t appeared before. We Are Green and Trembling, a most interesting translation for this title, anticipates an interspecies relationality that is at the same time futuristic and ancestral. Its luminous prose pulses several times to moments of absolute radiance. This work, a historical fiction that is also intimate, deviant, and populated by other presences, confirms some things we already knew and functions as a piece of futurology: the fires that will burn in the past, all fires, continue to burn.

We Are Green and Trembling is beautifully translated by Robin Myers to echo the feeling of a panoply of voices and speakers in this polyphonic New World. … While Cabezón Cámara portrays in vivid detail the violence inherent in the colonial project, she keeps her hero mostly away from it, his murders only recollections, his attitude to his Indigenous wards patient, before he eventually melts into the jungle—presented as a space for possibility and transformation, but also one where the past is wiped clean, unaccounted for and blank.

Argentine writer and founder of the feminist movement Ni una menos Gabriela Cabezón Cámara turns Argentine history on its head with a trans main character and transformation at its core—this remarkable novel is powerful, sensual and imaginative.

A bold and compassionate reimagining of an extraordinary queer life.

This is already a disobedient literary classic.

At times a swashbuckling tale of conquest laced with magical realism and surrealism, We Are Green and Trembling is historical fiction in name only... a searing critique of modernity’s colonial echoes: a resurgence of far-right ideology, cultural erasure, and gender-based oppression. Through its exploration of identity, history, and resistance, Cabezón Cámara dismantles dominant narratives and power structures. In doing so, she constructs a story that is not only inclusive but also redemptive—anchored in the richness of language, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of storytelling to reclaim what history tries to erase.

Cabezon’s novel is able to bring back extraordinary vitality to dialogue. A luminous novel in crushingly dark times: let’s celebrate the paradox.

In We Are Green and Trembling, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara finds beauty within the rot of conquest and delves into the contradictions of human nature, challenging the ways in which religion configures us as people and as territories. But she goes further. This is the truth of her literature: she presents us with the possibility of telling our stories through the caverns and silences that have enabled humanity's ongoing existence. Neither angels nor demons, but worldly creatures. No heroes, no gods–just human beings whose organic narration of their own lives serves to question the very conception of the world.

The novel blows up the well-known story that is written from the experience of the virile by incorporating a voice that pays attention to the sensuality and hostility of the landscape, the ambitions and fears of the characters, as well as the corruption of the bodies that Cabezón Cámara describes directly and masterfully without prejudice. She explores a fabulous cadence in the combination of Spanish with Guaraní and the theological baroque of the 17th century, to create a unique language with a particular rhythm. This novel embraces the bastardism that gives rise to America, destroys anthropocentrism and returns to nature its eroticism without the colonizing exoticism. Here is a living being that breathes, spills and rots to give new life, giving us back the certainty that we are also that: something alive that belongs to something bigger.

It presents the complexity of the colonial and gender discourse and its capacity to combine and have coexist different traditions, cultures and languages. An audacious re-reading of a controversial historical figure and its risk-taking, poetic and animal-like prose.

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara is a writer of both epic scope and intimate precision. In Las niñas del naranjel, she scathingly renders the ravages of Spanish colonialism in the Americas while also capturing, say, the infinite and infinitesimal connections among living creatures in the jungle; the ever-shifting ebb and flow of individual memory; and the fragile tenderness shared by improbable companions. Her historical imagination is both unsparing and endlessly playful, her prose rich and teeming with life, her ethics --her way of looking at the natural world, at the relationships among species, at human atrocities and bonds-- a source of genuine solace and inspiration to me. I think she's one of the most electrifying writers working today.

A ceaseless wash of verve and convictions.... This new release focuses on Hemphill’s exquisite verse, allowing us to admire him as a stylist while also providing a reminder of why he found it necessary to bring these lingual gifts to bear on politics. Unabashedly erotic and relentless in its solicitude.

In Cámara's lushly mesmeric and seamlessly translated prose, a gentle surrealism pervades We Are Green and Trembling.