Only a Little While Here by María Ospina
I picked this book up two days after the loss of my 15-year-old beagle, and I am so glad I didn’t put it right down. The first story alone – about the love of a dog for her person – made the book more than worth the time. I was her person, and now I truly understand the depth of her devotion. As a full-fledged imaginer, I think all the time about what animals, birds, and bugs even think as they navigate the same world we do. These stories brought my vague notions alive. What do migrating birds think about on long, solitary flights compelled only by instincts? Why does that wasp continue to dig and tunnel and finally surface to a life that is fraught from the beginning? The scientific among us may scoff at these stories. Anyone who has owned a beagle knows they are true.
Only a Little While Here by María Ospina, (List Price: $28, Scribner, 9781668097083, March 2026)
Reviewed by Doloris, Book No Further in Roanoke, VA
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I know a lot of fairy tales.
Like I cut my teeth on them. I grew up reading lots of fairy tale collections, and I realized I could only with difficulty think of fairytales where women were friends, where women talk to each other, and where they weren’t antagonists to each other in some way. I know they’re there, but the fact that I could reach for 10 stories of women waiting for rescue or women waiting to be chosen or women seeking husbands or, you know, that sort of thing instead of a story of women setting out together to have adventures—which is really what I wanted to tell my 7 year old niece who is asking me for a fairy tale— It was very disturbing to me, and I just remember in that moment thinking I’m just going to make something up. I’m gonna make something up because I really want her to know that there is room in fairytales for girls to be friends.
I hope I don’t give too much away, but I was quite inspired by Witness, with Harrison Ford amongst the Amish. I was really interested in this idea of a gangster amongst peacemakers, which is really what Witness is. I find that really fascinating. I became interested in Celtic Christianity because it was very revolutionary at the time in ways that we slightly forget. This was a world of utter warlordism, a very, very violent world and it was pagan. All of that was predicated on the idea that it was good to be strong and kill people. If gods were with you, that’s what would happen. If gods weren’t with you, you’d be weak. The idea of a religion that was founded on the idea that you might want to be weak, or you might want to be humble, was completely insane to these people. I mean, they looked at it and just went, “You’re mad! What are you talking about?”
“Why was Anne Boleyn executed? This was a question I asked myself when writing The Beheading Game, in which Anne Boleyn wakes up after her own execution, escapes from her grave in the Tower of London, sews her head back on, and goes on a revenge quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry his next wife, Jane Seymour. Legally, the answer is she was executed because she was convicted of the crimes of treason, adultery and incest, but most historians today agree those charges were probably false. So, how did Anne go from being a queen consort, steps from the seat of English power, to climbing the steps to the scaffold in a matter of months? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely, and, although I came to many answers to this question during my research, all of them circled around one central theme: misogyny.”
“When we think of environmental disaster or climate change, we often think of catastrophic events—the Californian or Australian wildfires, deadly floods in Bangladesh or Pakistan, a destructive typhoon or hurricane. When events like those becomes the point of focus, we stop thinking about other kinds of destruction and degradation. I wanted to find a way to reveal what Rob Nixon called slow violence. I didn’t want the major catastrophes to entirely dominate the novel; I wanted to bring slower instances of change to the foreground.”
“I am endlessly fascinated by sexuality—it’s almost embarrassing how much it shows in my published works. Similarly, I’m always exploring grief and the loss of innocence. Writing 200 Monas felt like a fun way to explore both simultaneously. The intersection between grief and sex somehow reminded me of being young, when the death of my father coincided with my spring awakening; I was always seeking refuge in romantic relationships, sexy films, and perverted conversations with my friends. I wanted to write something that captured that dichotomy in some way, this idea of being sad and horny at the same time.”
“There are only so many stories out there—people say seven—but for me, the question is always: what is the question I want to ask?…In Kin, the question I was interested in interrogating is the idea of searching for one’s mother. The classic story tells us, of course you search for your mother. If someone says, I don’t know where my mother is, we frame it as a brave quest to find her. But I wanted to question that impulse. Is it always better to know? Is it okay not to know? Can we learn to be satisfied with not knowing? In real life, people can be satisfied with what they have. In real life, you can marry someone who isn’t the person you once dreamed of and still have a good life. In a story, that’s often treated as an unpardonable compromise. I’m trying to bring into story life the wisdom we already know from real life.”