Read with the Lit & Luz Book Club!
The Lit & Luz Book Club/Club de lectura was created and organized by Community & Literary Arts Coordinator Miguel Jiménez as an opportunity for Chicagoans to read and discuss some of today’s most exciting contemporary Mexican authors in both Spanish and English. This year’s selected texts are from Lit & Luz Festival alums!
Club de lectura Lit & Luz fue creada por el Coordinador de Enlace Comunitario, Miguel Jiménez, para ofrecer una oportunidad en la que todos los residentes de Chicago podrán leer algunos de los más emocionantes textos literarios contemporáneos de hoy día. ¡Los textos seleccionados de este año son de participantes del Festival de Lit & Luz!
Are you looking for a live event? Click here.
July Book
Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes) by Fernanda Melchor (Mex) Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
August Book
Lost Children Archive (Desierto Sonoro, translated from the Spanish by Daniel Saldaña París y Valeria Luiselli) by Valeria Luiselli (Mex)
September Books
Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant (Ilegal: Reflexiones de un inmigrante indocumentado, translated from the English by Verónica Murguía and José Ángel Navejas) by José Ángel N. (Mex/US)
Finna: Poems by Nate Marshall (US)
October Books
Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Pétalos y otras historias incómodas) by Guadalupe Nettel Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine
Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes)
by Fernanda Melchor (Mex)
Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (New Directions)
Club Meeting
July 27th, 6:30 p.m.online Author conversation with special guest Catherine Lacey
July 28th, 6:30 p.m.Join us on our YouTube page.
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
Considered one of the greatest Latin American novels in recent times. On the shortlist for the 2020 International Booker Prize.
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread...more
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR
Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. Her novel Hurricane Season and collection This Is Not Miami are both forthcoming from New Directions..
Sophie Hughes is a literary translator who works chiefly from Spanish to English. She is known for her translations of contemporary writers such as Laia Jufresa, Rodrigo Hasbún, Alia Trabucco Zerán and Fernanda Melchor.
Reviews
One of Mexico’s most promising and prominent writers—Melchor writes of lives with specificity, with a crude recognition of their humanity that allows, if not for redemption or hope for those lives, at least some measure of peace for their dead. Virtuosic prose.
—Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Bookforum
Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.
—Jesse Ball
Lost Children Archive (Desierto sonoro, translated from the Spanish by Daniel Saldaña París y Valeria Luiselli) by Valeria Luiselli (Mex) (Penguin Random House)
Club Meetings
Monday, August 17th, 6:30pm
Zoom Book Club Meet-Up #1 to discuss Part I
Monday, August 31st, 6:30pm
Zoom Book Club Meet-Up #2 to discuss Part II, III, and IV
online Author conversation
Tuesday, September 8th, 6:30pm
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the book
An artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet...more
About the Author
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India. She is the author of the award-winning novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) and Faces in the Crowd (2013), and the collections of essays Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends (2017)—all published by Coffee House Press. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions was described by the Texas Observer as "the first must-read book of the Trump era" and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2017. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Granta, Harper's and McSweeney's. Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf), won the 2020 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was a 2019 Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Aspen Words Literary Prize, and shortlisted for the Simpson Literary Prize. Luiselli received the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
Reviews
“Impossibly smart, full of beauty, heart and insight. Everyone should read this book.”
—Tommy Orange, author of There There
“Like all great novels. . . . Lost Children Archive is unquestionably timely, [but] it also approaches a certain timelessness.”
—Los Angeles Times
Finna: Poems by Nate Marshall (US) (Penguin Random House)
Club Meeting
Monday, September 21st, 2020
online Author conversation
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy...more
About the Author
Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. He is the author and editor of numerous works including Wild Hundreds and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Nate is a member of The Dark Noise Collective and co-directs Crescendo Literary. He is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. He is from the South Side of Chicago.
Reviews
I am thankful for the honesty and self-examination in this work, yes. But even beyond that, I am thankful for a speaker who speaks as my people might, yelling across a parking lot or during a card game. I am thankful that this, too, is a part of the honesty this marvelous collection is in pursuit of.—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead in the Rain and A Fortune for Your Disaster
My original blurb was ‘this book decent,’ but I was told that the editor wouldn’t go for that so I am going to tell you instead that this book catalyzes a necessary conversation about Black language practices, culture, ownership, and belonging, and the commodification of Black people’s tongues. . . . So, like I said, this book decent.—Eve L. Ewing, author of Electric Arches and 1919
Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant (Ilegal: Reflexiones de un inmigrante indocumentado, translated from the English by Verónica Murguía and José Ángel Navejas) by José Ángel Navejas. (Mex/US) (University of Illinois Press)
Club Meeting
Monday, September 28th, 2020
online Author conversation
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
A day after José Ángel Navejas. first crossed the United States border from Mexico, he was caught and then released onto the streets of Tijuana. Undeterred, N. crawled back through a tunnel to San Diego, where he entered the United States to stay...more
About the Author and the translator
José Ángel Navejas is a writer and translator whose essays have appeared in cultural magazines in the United States and Mexico.
Verónica Murguía es escritora y traductora y radica en México.
Reviews
A memoir from a decent man living in the shadows, evading questions and telling lies, presented here anonymously since to reveal his identity would mean to risk arrest and deportation. . . . An utterly believable close-up picture of one illegal immigrant's life in the United States. —Kirkus Reviews
N. is able to put a truly human face on the 'shadow' that he is in our society and show us that he, along with the other eleven million undocumented people who live and toil in our nation, deserve to come out into the sun—el Beisman
Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Pétalos y otras historias incómodas) by Guadalupe Nettel (Mex) Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (Seven Stories Press)
Club Meeting
Monday, October 26th, 6:30 PM CT
online Author conversation
WEDNESDAY, October 28th, 6:30 PM CT
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel's stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, here are six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe…more
About the Author and the translator
The New York Times described Guadalupe Nettel’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories, as “five flawless stories.” A Bogotá 39 author and Granta “Best Untranslated Writer,” Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize, the Antonin Artaud Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award, and most recently the 2014 Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born is her highly anticipated first novel to appear in English. She lives and works in Mexico City.
Poet and translator Suzanne Jill Levine earned a BA at Vassar College, an MA at Columbia University, and a PhD at New York University. Her poetry chapbook Reckoning (2012) combines her original poetry with her translations of the work of Octavio Paz, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Severo Sarduy. She is also the author of the literary biography Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman (2000) and the critical work The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991).
Reviews
The haunting stories in this collection feature characters that inhabit bodies which are strange places, so much so that they lose their human form, or are subjected to macabre investigations or perverse compulsions. Voyeurs, symbiosis, metamorphosis, fluids; the links here are hazy, the relationships with other beings, mutant. Guadalupe Nettel reminds us that there is nothing stranger than existence lived in these containers made of flesh, blood and madness.—Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost In The Fire: Stories
I love the work of Guadalupe Nettel, one of Mexico’s greatest living writers. Her fiction is brilliant and original, always suffused with sensuality and strange science – and these stories in ‘Bezoar’ are among her best.—Paul Theroux
Friends of the Fest
City Lit Books, 2523 N Kedzie Blvd, Chicago, IL 60647
Volumes Bookcafe, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL 60622
Unabridged , 3251 N Broadway, Chicago, IL 60657
Semicolon, 515 North Halsted St, Chicago, IL, 60642
Pilsen Community Books, 1102 W 18th St, Chicago IL 60608
Seminary Coop, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Chicago, IL 60637
Madison Street Books, 1127 West Madison Street, Chicago IL 60607
Looking for a title at the Chicago Public Library? Click here for information on where to find them as of 7/24/20.
