“Malas,” the title of Marcela Fuentes’s well-received novel, roughly translates to “bad women.” But bad is a relative term here, and in the small Texas border town of Fuentes’s debut, easily won by any woman bold enough to live as she pleases. The novel began life as a fairy tale that Fuentes wrote while at the Iowa Writers Workshop. The author grew up in Del Rio, Texas, near the border, and now lives in Fort Worth.
BOOKS: What have you been reading?
FUENTES: I have been doing a lot of audio books because I’ve been in airports constantly. I listened to Percival Everett’s new book, “James.” That’s a very smart book. I also listened to Rufi Thorpe’s “Margo’s Got Money Trouble,” which also just came out. That is such a great book. It presents itself as a fun, crazy read but it does this interesting thing with craft. It’s written in the third and first persons but both are the same character. It’s also really a book about feminism.
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BOOKS: What are some of your other best reads of late
FUENTES: I love Vanessa Chan’s “The Storm We Made,” which is a World War II story set in Malaysia. The main character gets in a relationship with a spy. That book didn’t shy away from the horrors of the war.
BOOKS: Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction?
FUENTES: Not necessarily. I love to revisit Jane Austen. I love to go back to Louise Erdrich. Her first novel, “Love Medicine,” is still so amazing. I also love horror. I like Stephen Graham Jones, who writes indigenous horror. His “The Only Good Indians” is an ecology novel that does a lot of interesting things with the supernatural character of Deer Woman, who is a vengeful spirit. I still love Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” because I love vampires. Anne Rice’s vampire books were the go-to books of my childhood. I probably read every Rice book in my grade school library. How were those even in the school library?
BOOKS: Did you grow up in a houseful of readers?
FUENTES: I didn’t have a lot of readers in my family but because they weren’t readers, they weren’t checking what I read. My family thought if I was reading, it was good for me. I remember reading “The Stranger” by Albert Camus at my cousin’s house when I was in sixth grade. It was so depressing.
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BOOKS: Do you read fairy tales?
FUENTES: I love fairy tales. One of my favorites is “The Six Swans,” which is about a girl whose brothers have been turned into swans. It’s about the struggle she goes through to be a heroine to her family. Usually in fairy tales, the girls are locked in the tower.
BOOKS: How do you work fairy tales into your reading?
FUENTES: I go on binges. I’ll watch some supernatural show, and sometimes it will be an adaptation of a fairy tale. Then I dig up the actual story and read that. I’ll go down the rabbit hole.
BOOKS: Can you remember the last time that happened?
FUENTES: I think it was “The Ballad of Tam Lin,” which I saw a version of on some Netflix show. It’s a about a pregnant woman named Janet who has to save her beloved from the faeries by holding him for 21 heartbeats. When she hugs him, he turns into all these awful things, such as a piece of molten iron and a snake. That story is so compelling. How do you hold on to someone through all their monstrous iterations. And you wouldn’t expect a pregnant lady to be the hero of a story.
BOOKS: Do you have favorite malas — bad girls — in fiction?
FUENTES: I love Catherine from “Wuthering Heights.” Wow, she’s such a terror. Look at Maleficent, we love her even more than Sleeping Beauty. Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” is one. I don’t know if there are any in Jane Austen’s novels because everyone is too uptight but Libby in “Pride and Prejudice” will tell you off. There’s the housekeeper in “Jane Eyre” and the housekeeper in “Rebecca.” Watch out for housekeepers. There are so many amazing, powerful but villainous women in stories. We might not cheer for them but they are sometimes the most compelling characters.
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Follow us on Facebook or Twitter @GlobeBiblio. Amy Sutherland is the author, most recently, of “Rescuing Penny Jane” and she can be reached at [email protected].