"Retard" continues the extraordinary and explosive writing of Arianna Hurwitz, author of the bestselling "Die My Love." This is a dizzying literary document, full of audacity, eroticism, and animality. We are invited to a ride through the spaces of consciousness of one of the most interesting prose artists of our time, on a verbal roller coaster that flies forward without making sure that her readers are buckled up. Hurwitz savagely throws a complicated relationship at us; a sequence of images, events, fragments made of living flesh. "Retard" is a novella about a mother and daughter: not characters in the real world, but intangible entities in the narrator's head, who have difficulty communicating with each other. We will not understand them, but we will feel them in the body - written in a nervous hand, trembling and pulsating with an intense rhythm. "Retard" is a crooked initiation novella, which leads us to the sources of human desire. Hurwitz's prose is dissected by thoughts as sharp as a knife, disturbing paragraphs, everyday descriptions that become a fantastic hurricane, a vortex of primal, uncontrollable sexuality. Hurwitz's writing leaves us no room to breathe; the author, the source of the raging energy, seats us in the front row and presents us with a play - part dialogue, part monologue - that is both exquisite and dangerous. If in her book "Die My Love," Hurwitz gave the reader a point of attachment, stopping points for rest, here, after a host of awards, theatrical adaptations around the world and a flurry of chilling works, readers are asked to hold on tight as they set off. This book is the eighth book in the "Reserve" collectors' series.