Read with the Lit & Luz Book Club!
The Lit & Luz Book Club/Club de lectura was created and organized by Miguel Jiménez as an opportunity for Chicagoans to read and discuss some of today’s most exciting contemporary Mexican and Mexican American authors in both Spanish and English. This year’s Lit & Luz Book Club authors include two 2024-25 Collaboration Cohort participants who will join us in Chicago this fall.
El Club de lectura Lit & Luz fue creado y organizado por Miguel Jiménez para ofrecerles la oportunidad a todos los residentes de Chicago de leer y discutir algunos de los más emocionantes textos literarios contemporáneos de autorxs mexicanos y mexicoamericanos tanto en español como en inglés. Este año, entre las autoras del Club de lectura Lit & Luz se encuentran dos participantes del Grupo de Colaboración 2024-25, quienes nos acompañarán en Chicago este otoño.
What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Copper Canyon Press, 2024)
Furia / Fury by Clyo Mendoza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Seven Stories Press, 2024)
Find these titles at your local book shop,
including the 2024 Lit & Luz Book Club Partner Pilsen Community Books
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What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Copper Canyon Press, 2024)
Pilsen Community Books, 1102 W 18th St, Chicago, IL
Tuesday August 27
6:00 - 7:00 pm CT
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the book
Javier Peñalosa M.’s What Comes Back is a procession, a journey, a search for a body of water that has disappeared. Featured in separate sections, original Spanish poems and Robin Myers’s English translations highlight tender ruminations on loss, memory, and communion. Just as landscapes witness and “preserve what happens along the length of them,” so do people. We watch as travelers navigate realms between the living and the dead, past mountains and dried-up rivers to map, trace, and remember the past and future. Several sections, each bearing the title “What Comes Back,” guide readers on a looping voyage where they are “orbited around the gravity of what had come to be”: the absence of Mexico City’s rivers and other absences wrought by war, climate change, and forced migration. What remains is a desire to name the missing, to wrest belonging from dispossession, endurance from erasure. Rattled between ecological destruction and human violence, the spirit pushes on toward connection and community.
About the Author & the Translator
Javier Peñalosa M. writes poetry, children’s literature, and scripts for movies and television. He holds a bachelor’s degree in education and a MFA in creative writing from NYU. He is the author of the poetry collections Aviario, Los trenes que partían de mí, Los que regresan, and H. He has received fellowships from the Foundation for Mexican Literature, FONCA (Jóvenes Creadores), and the New York Fund For The Arts. He won the 2009 Premio Nacional de Poesía Enriqueta Ochoa, and the 2017 Premio Joaquín Xirau Icaza, from El Colegio de México. In 2024, he was a writer in residence at the Casa Estudio Cien Años de Soledad. His book Los que regresan (What Comes Back) was published in 2024 by Copper Canyon Press, with an English translation by Robin Myers. His poems have been translated into English and German and have appeared in anthologies, magazines, movies, and plays. As a scriptwriter, Peñalosa has participated in the creation and development of TV series and movies. He has written the children's books El día que María perdió la voz, Historia de Ele chiquita, Un grandioso desorden, Un golpe de viento, La liberación de los parques, and El recreo, among others. He facilitates creative writing workshops for children and adults and collaborates on various multidisciplinary projects.
Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her latest poetry translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), in spite of ourselves by Tatiana Lipkes (John of the Thing), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), and Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books). She was double-longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry. As a poet, her work has recently been published in The Drift, Poetry London, Denver Quarterly, Yale Review, Guesthouse, and selected for the 2022 Best American Poetry anthology. She lives in Mexico City.
Praise for the book
“A series of portraits, perhaps cubist, perhaps multiple angles at the same time, such energy, and after the presentation of the acute upon the acute, the obtuse upon the obtuse, what the reader is left with is the energy to keep reading. To read again. To flip through the pages, proceeding like footsteps across desert path, to consider the restlessness of time and history and future, to be active and to be an active participant. To activate. To read.” —Greg Bem, North of Oxford
Furia / Fury by Clyo Mendoza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Seven Stories Press, 2024)
Pilsen Community Books, 1102 W 18th St, Chicago, IL
Thursday September 26
6:00 -7:00 pm CT.
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men—and of their mothers, lovers and companions—Mendoza explores her characters’ passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them.
After winning the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & the Translator
Clyo Mendoza (Oaxaca, 1993) is author of the poetry collections Anamnesis (Cuadrivio, 2016) and Silencio (Almadía, 2023), which won the Premio Internacional Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in poetry (2017). She has received support from: the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes de México (Jóvenes Creadores fellowship for poetry, 2015-2016 and fiction, 2020-2021); the Fundación Antonio Gala, in Córdoba, Spain (2018-2019); and the Fundación Finistres in Barcelona (2023). Her first novel, Furia, was published in Spanish by Almadía (Mexico), by Sigilio (Spain and Argentina), by Dum Dum (Bolivia), and is forthcoming with Banda Propia (Chile) and Luna Insomne (Dominican Republic). Furia was translated into English, Portuguese and Italian, and won the Premio Amazon Primera Novela 2022, and the Premio Javier Morote, considered by the judges as “a Pedro Páramo for the 21st century.” As a script writer, she collaborated on the short film Mil ojos me observan, which won best national short film at the 2021 Morelia International Film Festival, and on Maquinal (2023), both directed by Nicolás Gutiérrez Wenhammar. She is a co-writer of the full-length film Paralizada, alongside Abia Castillo and the filmmaker Michelle Garza Cervera.
Christina MacSweeney has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognized in a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez, and Jazmina Barrera, whose autobiographical text, Linea Nigra, is, at the time of writing, a double finalist in the NBCC awards (translation and autobiography). She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles, and interviews on a variety of platforms.
Praises for the book
“Drawing on the language of cinema and oral history, Mendoza debuts with a beguiling and enticing fever dream of sex and violence in the Mexican desert... Mendoza’s depictions of her troubled characters’ inner lives are as indelible as her monstrous visions. This is impossible to put down.” – Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Fury has the poetic and wild force of the desert. In its pages there is tenderness, fear and forceful, rhythmic writing with images that are difficult to forget. It is about the violence of desire that turns us into dogs that drool, howl and bite, but also about love in the midst of hostility and helplessness. This is why it is a disturbing and, at the same time, deeply moving novel.” —Mónica Ojeda, author of Jawbone
For questions about groups, content, or other, contact
Miguel Jiménez, miguel@makemag.org
If you’re looking for additional recommendations, please check out these past book club titles:
