The Shadow of the Mammoth: Stories

by Fabio Morábito, Curtis Bauer (translator)

A brilliant, unsettling collection of 18 stories about deception, translation, loneliness, and connection, from one of Mexico’s greatest modern writers.

Why is grass in airports so important? Can you be an extraordinary copyist without knowing how to read or write? Are there successful musicians who only play a single note in their life? Book after book, Fabio Morábito’s stories have become increasingly radical in their way of showing us that imagination is not a curious feature of the mind, but perhaps the only way to not feel excluded from the real world.

With prose free of unnecessary explanation and descriptive embellishments, The Shadow of the Mammoth insists once again on the guiding principle of Morábito’s work: playing fair with the reader, who advances in reading these stories as he did when writing them, open to any direction they could take. For this reason, these stories are as unexpected as they are different from each other, all united by that pleasure of storytelling that has always been Morábito’s unmistakable hallmark.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2025

Reviews

[Silvia Moreno-Garcia]

I picked up a copy of Fabio Morábito's collection The Shadow of the Mammoth, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer. Morábito, who was born in Egypt to Italian parents but relocated to Mexico as a teenager, is a precise writer who tends towards the microscopic and spare as can be seen in his story “The Grass at Airports.” A dynamic, multi-faceted talent.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take your pick in 18 frigid flavors of paranoia with a surprise topping of crumbled O’Henry ‘fun size’ bars! Should the size being classified as ‘fun’ affect your enjoyment of the crushing dusting of brutal truth twists, well, maybe those taste buds aren’t your real taste friends. In fact, nothing here is as it seems once Morábito overthinks his way into your heart.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabio Morábito writes:

“It’s surprising to see, for example, how something as simple as making a photocopy manages to affect us when we see this action repeated five or six times. There’s the woman who places a sheet on the glass, lowers the lid, presses the start button, waits a few seconds while the scanner light sweeps over the sheet, and removes the photocopy that comes out the bottom tray. She is only one of the extras who move around the office, and once the actors enter the scene, we will hardly notice her, but now, her actions next to the photocopier, repeated over and over again in the performance prior to the shot, acquire a more profound meaning than we expected. We think: how beautiful this is, how the dead must envy us, and what wouldn’t any of them give to make a photocopy in an office, like that woman! In fact, we make a point to do the same as her a soon as the opportunity presents itself, certain that the simple act of making a photocopy, if we pay the proper attention to it, will bring us a wealth of happiness. Actually, the performances that Pencroff places in front of our eyes, made up of insignificant gestures and actions, convince us that if we always conducted ourselves like extras in a movie, taking the greatest care in everything we do, even the most insignificant things, our life would be immensely happy.”

[Tori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were better than others, all were fistfuls of sand.