Fiction
“Dark Day,” runner-up of the 2022 Sewanee Review Fiction Prize, judged by Raven Leilani
“The Brownie,” Kenyon Review, May/June 2021
“Air Hunger,“ winner of the 2020 Indiana Review Fiction Prize, judged by Angela Flournoy, Volume 42.2.
Nonfiction
“The Unlikely Story of the Body Who Loved the World,” published by Roxane Gay, 2019
Praise
“María José Candela writes into and against the magical realist tradition—to astonishing effect. Her stories are funny, lively, and poignant; they summon up, with imaginative precision, feelings of dislocation and alienation across geographic and psychic space. FSG is delighted to support her as she embarks on the first steps of a major career.”
–Mitzi Angel
“The author of ‘Dark Day’ writes unsentimentally about the frank business of being embodied. The prose is surprising and direct, attuned to the logistics of care and the claustrophobic liminality of romantic ambivalence. In this story, want is presented in its raw form, unmanaged and human.”
-Raven Leilani
“What makes “Air Hunger” impressive is the writer’s ability to evoke two modes of being at once. There are the two settings–the winter streets of Rome, with its young clergy and indifferent taxi drivers; and the shopping malls, apartments and swimming pools of Medellín. The story also examines two postures, both façades, that the narrator adopts at different points in her life. The result of this duality is a main character who feels complicated and real, one who is capable of accessing her regret as well as agency. This narrator and the story she tells will undoubtedly linger in readers’ minds.”
-Angela Flournoy
María José Candela 