Discover Books by Lit & Luz Authors
Ruido
TENGO UN PULMÓN QUE NO ES EL CIELO
COWBOY & OTHER POEMS
By Alejandro Albarrán Polanco
Published by Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019
Translated from the original Spanish by Rachel Galvin
“A raucous outburst that opposes a poetry of silence--an aseptic, apolitical, 'pure' poetry--with the noise of the world, the sound of the background, a brutal and ungraspable landscape quickly glimpsed through the small window of a train in motion.” —Luis Felipe Fabre
On Lighthouses
By Jazmina Barrera
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Two Lines Press, 2020
“Precise and erudite, Barrera’s writing is as alluring and arresting as the landscapes and stories it conveys. Each piece is crafted with care, imbued with Barrera’s poignant critical sense and her perspicacious ability to unravel the different levels of affect, historicity, and magnificence that constitute the everyday life of each lighthouse.” —Ignacio M. Sánchez, Los Angeles Review of Books
Beauty Salon
By Mario Bellatin
Translated from the Spanish by Kurt Hollander
Published by City Lights, 2010
"Beauty Salon is pithy, allegorical and profoundly disturbing, with a plot that evokes The Plague by Camus or Blindness by José Saramago."
— New York Times
Flores y Biografía ilustrada de Mishima
By Mario Bellatin
Published by 7Vientos, 2014
Salón de belleza (Edición Definitiva)
By Mario Bellatin
Published by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2016
"Mario Bellatin tiene una imaginación prodigiosa, múltiple, incesante; me deja absorta, boquiabierta, exhausta." — Margo Glantz
The Balloonist
By Eula Biss
Published by Hanging Loose Press, 2002
"With deceptively quiet, unflinching compassion, Eula Biss records the perceptual wedges that cleave the self from its origins. The family history refracted here is mutable, notable, more gravid than grave. THE BALLOONISTS holds a fresh line on confession, biography, and the formal uses of information in poetry" —Rebecca Wolff
On Immunity: An Innoculation
By Eula Biss
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015
“Imagine Eula Biss as herself a vaccine against vague and incoherent thinking, as a booster to the acuity of your thought, as a thermometer taking the temperature of our ideas about purity, contagion, individuality, and community. This book is a magnificent piece of research and of writing.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Having and Being Had
By Eula Biss
Published by Riverhead Books, 2020
“Capitalism is made tangible, traceable, and insidiously inescapable as Biss, with mindful tenacity, connects its abstract tenets to her own domestic acquisitions. Having and Being Had is a revelatory and necessary primer on how late capitalism affects our daily lives.” —Cathy Park Hong
The Performance of Becoming Human
By Daniel Borzutzky
Published by Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016
“Like any good satirist, Borzutzky considers his subjectivity with the same lens he applies to the systems he critiques, and The Performance of Becoming Human is an apogee of that inquiry. Since The Book of Interfering Bodies, Daniel Borzutzky has been the fabulist we most need because he’s unafraid to detail the truth of our oligarchy, without pedantry. In his figurative world our bodies are forced through privatized meat grinders, but funnily in the way that all dark horror stories trigger our gallows humor. I’m thrilled every time Borzutzky brings a book in the world, learn the most about reality from him.” —Carmen Giménez Smith
Sounds of Crossing
By Alex E. Chávez
Published by Duke University Press, 2017
"Chavez uses the songs of the borderlands to talk about immigration into the US and the culture that has sprung up around the border. He pulls in both history and current situations – and best of all, his own experiences as a Mexican academic and musician – to create a multidimensional, gorgeous book." —Alejandra Oliva
The White House
By Joel Craig
Published by Green Lantern Press, 2012
“Filled with elegies to aging rock 'n' rollers, explorations of skipping romance, and studied frustration with the world as it appears (and a sincere belief that quiet hands, by themselves, can change it), Craig's book doesn't so much demand as much as call out to the reader, in sequence like an all-night deejay party, with time to dance, time to rest, time to go to the bar and get a refill, or outside for a quick cigarette, hitting on someone on the way back in, hoping to strut, step and swing with them.”—Publisher
Barranca
By Diana del Ángel
Published by Secretaría de Cultura, Dirección General de Publicaciones, 2018
“Barranca es un libro conmovedor, un sendero de recuerdos guiados por la añoranza en el que se imponen como agentes principales el silencio y la indiferencia heredados, el temor, la soledad y el dolor de una infancia interrumpida; una vorágine de sentimientos que desemboca en la asimilación de uno mismo.”—Centro Cultural Mexiquense Bicentenario
Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu
By Edgar Garcia
Published by the University of Chicago Press, 2020
“Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world.” —Publisher
Hypothermia
By Álvaro Enrigue
Translated from the original Spanish by Brendan Riley
Published by Dalkey Archive Press, 2013
“Hypothermia explores the perilous limits of love, language, and personality, the brutal gravity of cultural misunderstandings, and the coldly smirking will to self-destruction hiding within our irredeemably carnal lives.” —Publisher
Catábasis exvoto
By Carla Faesler
Published by Bonobos, 2010
“En la tradición popular del exvoto, el donante entra en la escena, un universo creado a partir de vivencias y experiencias relacionadas con sucesos o circunstancias específicas. Este tipo de objetos son ofrendas a ciertas divinidades y generalmente tienen que ver con una devoción agradecida o una promesa obsequiada. En el exvoto, texto e imagen son coprotagonistas. Lo escrito es unas veces narración íntima que da voz al donante con cierta independencia de la imagen.” —Goodreads
Lola Álvarez Bravo Cazadora de Imágenes
By Carla Faesler
Published by Ediciones SM, 2016
“Lola y Manuel se la pasan tomando fotos. A ellos les fascina captar imágenes de todo lo que se les pone enfrente, pero como sólo tienen una cámara, no les queda otro remedio que compartirla. Aunque la cámara es de Manuel, Lola ya ha quedado hechizada por la magia de esa caja que captura las cosas y las detiene en el tiempo. Lola y Manuel se la pasan cazando, ¿cazando qué? Imágenes. Las buscan por todos lados: en los mercados, en las banquetas, en los patios, en su casa. Alguien sube una escalera. ¡Clic! Mira, aquí está ese hombre, en esta foto estará para siempre subiendo una escalera. Observa su rostro: ¿está triste o contento?; mira cómo sube: ¿va con calma o con prisa?, ¿va de ida o de vuelta? Observa los peldaños y el barandal: ¿dónde es?”—Publisher
Flores Para Los Muertos / Flowers for the Dead
By Luis Felipe Fabre
Translated from the original Spanish by Amanda Hopkinson, Daniel Borzutzky, and Cole Heinowitz.
Published by Juan de la Cosa, 2016
“FLOWERS FOR THE DEAD is a carefully selected collection of poems by Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre. It is divided into three sections: "A Season in (Aztec) Hell," "Funerary Monument to Gerónimo Calbo," and "Notes on a Zombie Cataclysm." Written originally in Spanish and translated into English by Amanda Hopkinson, Daniel Borzutzky, and Cole Heinowitz, Fabre's poetic and social critique is permeated with satire, desire and tragedy, revealing a contemporary aesthetic and political urgency that is native of its own geography and sociopolitical dynamics.” — Book Depository
Notas Em Torno Do Apocalipse Zumbi
By Luis Felipe Fabre
Translated from the original Spanish by Ricardo Domeneck
Published by LUMME EDITOR, 2016
“Livro do poeta e ensaísta mexicano Luis Felipe Fabre autor de ensaios sobre (des)escritura, antiescritura e não-escritura.” — Publisher
Pulleys and Locomotion
By Rachel Galvin
Published by Black Lawrence, 2009
“Rachel Galvin's debut collection PULLEYS & LOCOMOTION is a hub for movement, immigration, and flight. Alternating between lyrical extension and succinct prose poems, this book brings together science, philosophy, folktale, and half-remembered history. Raised in Rochester, NY, the home of Eastman Kodak, Galvin has an imagination shaped by the technologies and metaphors of photographic and filmic vision. Like a zoetrope, the spinning cylinder that led to early motion picture, the pages of PULLEYS & LOCOMOTION form a device that creates irresistible motion out of a succession of poems.” —Indiebound
News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936-1945
By Rachel Galvin
Published by Oxford University Press, 2018
"This book, however, goes beyond poetry or literature. It explains how press and daily news influenced these authors and their poetry, because they could not experience firsthand the events that were happening in the war fronts ... Poetry written back in the decades of 1930 and 1940 brings to the table both context and sociohistorical aspects and opens the door to contemporary poetry which observes more recent wars and events." — Loarre Andreu Perez, Communication Booknotes Quarterly
Conjunto Vacío
By Verónica Gerber Bicecci
Published by Almadía Ediciones, 2020
“Verónica Gerber escribe con una luminosa intimidad; su novela es ingeniosa, brillante, conmovedora, profundamente original. Leerla me hizo sentir que se había recompuesto el mundo.” –Francisco Goldman
LA COMPAÑIA
By Verónica Gerber Bicecci
Published by Almadía Ediciones, 2020
"Verónica Gerber Bicecci es, lo sabemos, una trashumante de los géneros.En este volumen, a su escritura se unen la reescritura de Dávila, la sobreescritura de Felguérez y la excavación de la memoria colectiva. La compañía se despliega como geografía textual y archivo de ruina, del residuo y de las trazas del extractivismo. Estamos ante un libro inquietante de una las escritoras mexicanas del siglo XXI que más arriesgan y resignifican su ejercicio literario.” —Sara Uribe
Hard Mouth
By Amanda Goldblatt
Published by Counterpoint, 2019
"Playfully, poetically unstable . . . What compels a woman to turn to the wilderness? What brings one, after a decade of caregiving, to exchange a terminal parent’s final vigil for the company of strangers? Goldblatt poses these questions with great assurance." —Lisa Locascio, The New York Times Book Review
Citizen Illegal
By José Guadalupe Olivarez
Published by Haymarket Books, 2018
"Citizen Illegal is right on time, bringing both empathy and searing critique to the fore as a nation debates the very humanity of the people who built it." —Eve Ewing, author of Electric Arches
Tomb Song
By Julián Herbert
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Graywolf Press, 2018
“[Julián Herbert is] among the more interesting and ambitious prose stylists of our time. . . . Irresistibly wise.”—Los Angeles Times
Ahora Imagino Cosas
By Julián Herbert
Published by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México 2019
“¿Herbert escribe memorias? ¿Ensayos? ¿Novelas? Sus libros son mash-ups de recuerdos, investigación y ornamentación ficcional, marcados por una cálida falta de respeto por los géneros -como es la vida.” —The New York Times
Controlled Decay
By Gabriela Jauregui
Published by Black Goat, 2008
“This first collection marks a new mind terrain, radical tempos, and wild-style tropes in Latina Letters and all poetry today—breaks through with incredible caliber and impossible power. She is Hegel and Kahlo, Serpent and Zen, Cantina blade and Zapatista jungle.”
“This first collection marks a new mind terrain, radical tempos, and wild-style tropes in Latina Letters and all poetry today—breaks through with incredible caliber and impossible power. She is Hegel and Kahlo, Serpent and Zen, Cantina blade and Zapatista jungle.”—Juan Felipe Herrera, author of 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border
CORREA BUSCA PERRA PERDIDA/LEASH SEEKS LOST BITCH
By Gabriela Jauregui
Published by Song Cave, 2015
“To find oneself in movement. To become a local fixture but not fixed. A flâneur; a transject (1). First half of the nineteenth century: A poet walks his lobster on a leash (2).First half of the twenty-first century: An artist flies out to Paris and in an act of will, intuition and humor, takes off his red argyle socks, knots them into a lobster shape, and ties them to a makeshift leash to drag them around the same garden (3).”—Terremoto.mx
A Different Bed Every Time
By Jac Jemc
Published by Dzanc Books, 2014
"To Jemc the world is a place where each person, every human cypher, must devour another. What then can we do, if we are devoured, if we are overcome with our own devouring? Her escape plan is inspired and ancient -- to become protean, to dwell in costume after costume, parcelling away the truth that can be found in each. But where is it hid? Ask her, though she may not say." — Jesse Ball, author of Silence Once Begun
The Grip of It
By Jac Jemc
Published by Titan Books, 2019
"A page-turning psychological thriller . . . [The Grip of It] is the clever work of a writer who has patiently carved out her own home in contemporary fiction . . . as chilling as it is evocative." ―Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
By Erika L. Sánchez
Published by Random House Children's Books, 2017
This gripping debut about a Mexican-American misfit is alive and crackling—a gritty tale wrapped in a page-turner…Part detective story, part coming-of-age tale, Sánchez's novel doesn't shy from heavy subject matter…The story spirals into dark territory when Julia begins to suffer from clinical depression. But she's so blunt, funny and brave that she never becomes an object of our pity. And her moments of joy…are transcendent.” —The New York Times Book Review - Catherine Hong
The Instructions
By Adam Levin
Published by McSweeney, 2010
"Young Adam Levin wowed me with this whip-smart, aching, hilarious novel, starring his own kind of post-modern wise child (a la Seymour Glass) and revolutionary. The ghost of DF Wallace would relish comparisons to this brave new talent. This year's best debut by a country mile." —Mary Karr
Bubblegum
By Adam Levin
Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, March 2021.
“Levin’s brains may have earned him a cult…but here he swells to a democratic reach. Give him a try sometime. His gate’s wide open.” —Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review
Cuaderno ideal
By Brenda Lozano
Published by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2014
“Este es un viaje al interior de la protagonista, que está a la espera de que regrese su amor de un largo viaje al otro lado del océano, y como una Penélope contemporánea teje sus historias y las desteje para recomenzarlas en su cuaderno ideal. La violencia que se vive en México es un telón de fondo, un enano el punto de partida para cuestionar las distintas escalas en la vida diaria, y una golondrina es símbolo constante y cambiante a lo largo de esta novela, que también abre sus páginas a una piñata de Proust, los planetitas a los que viaja un gato mientras duerme y a la canción Wild is the Wind.” — Publisher
Loop
By Brenda Lozano
Translated from the original Spanish by Annie McDermott
Published by Charco Press, 2019
"Lozano is a marvellous writer, bright, funny, subtly perverse, always moving." —Francisco Goldman, author of THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER
Faces in the Crowd
By Valeria Luiselli
Published by Coffee House Press, 2014
"In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates an extraordinary intimacy, a sensibility so alive it quietly takes over all your senses, quivering through your nerve endings, opening your eyes and heart. Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriage—and then, in the book's second half, wilder and something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call it—has rarely been so freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli is a masterful, entirely original writer." —Francisco Goldman
The Story of My Teeth
By Valeria Luiselli
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Coffee House Press, 2015
“Prefigured by her excellent book of essays, Sidewalks, The Story of My Teeth is playful, attentive and very smart without being for a minute pretentious. It’s Walter Benjamin without tears—sunnier, more casual and more nimble.” —New York Times Sunday Book Review
Lost Children Archive
By Valeria Luiselli
Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020
“An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood. . . . This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post
Edinburgh Notebook
By Valerie Mejer Caso
Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
Published by Action Books, March 2021
“The language that emerges is one pierced by the world and by our actions in the world. Constructed from the limit of experience, these poems have relinquished all rhetorical temptation, any purely verbal exploration, in order to insist on an infinitely more risky investigation: that of capturing the instant just before things turn to shadows.” —Raúl Zurita, author of The Country of Planks
Rain of the Future
By Valerie Mejer Caso
Published by Action Books, 2013.
Translated by A. S. Zelman-Doring, C. D. Wright, Forrest Gander
“Andre Breton famously wrote ‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all’ — Mejer convulses steady as a beating heart.”
— Publishers Weekly
This Blue Novel
By Valerie Mejer Caso
Published by Action Books, 2015; Bilingual edition
Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero from the original Spanish, Esta Novel Azul, published by El Tucán de Virginia in 2004.
“My experience with Valerie Mejer Caso was one of startling revelation, of wonder: I knew nothing of her book, and hardly an hour later, closing it, my life was another.”
— Raúl Zurita
Wild Hundreds
By Nate Marshall
Published by University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
“Marshall's poetry offers an insider's perspective that asks the reader to parse the sociopolitical systems that imperil black lives—not through abstract ideology, but through authentically rendered eyes: "every kid that's killed is one less free lunch,/ a fiscal coup. welcome to where we from.” — Publishers Weekly
Blood Percussion
By Nate Marshall
Published by Button Poetry, 2017
“With language that swerves, spars, and startles, Nate Marshall’s Blood Percussion adamantly asks us to consider our youth as more than mere statistics or headlines. These poems fearlessly embody the voices of boys and girls who grieve, wander, love, dream. In a world where appearances are consistently privileged, Marshall’s poems remind us how necessary it is to render the interiors of those whose lives we cannot let slip into the cracks of the very sidewalks we all traverse.” —Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam
Falsa Liebre
By Fernanda Melchor
Published by Almadía, 2013
“Algo se pudre en el trópico. En esa esquina del mundo disfrazada de paraíso, junto al mar, cuatro vidas están a punto de coincidir en la fatalidad de un engañoso día de verano. Andrik es un adolescente de hermoso ojos amarillos que ha caído en las garras de un amante celoso. Zahir está a punto de escapar de la esclavitud en la que lo mantiene una nefasta mujer; su mayor deseo es encontrar a Andrik para huir juntos del puerto y empezar una nueva vida. Pachi y Vinicio improvisan una excursión a la playa para borrar, al menos durante una tarde, las sombras que apagan sus vidas: esposas y madres castrantes, empleos grises, el miedo que proviene de su maltrecho presente, del futuro encarcelado.”—Publisher
Hurricane Season
By Fernanda Melchor
Translated from the original Spanish by Sophie Hughes
Published by New Directions, 2020
“Now in paperback, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is “a bilious, profane, blood-spattered tempest of rage” —The Wall Street Journal
Civilization Makes Me Lonely
By Jennifer Nelson
Published by Ahsahta Press, 2017
These poems are about the accelerated disintegration of society, imbued with the necessary hopelessness and sheer irritation of one’s physical manifestation in a world that continually rejects your existence. Where Nelson’s collection loses its momentum in the chapter ‘Locus Multus. The Sleeper’, which feels like more of an experimentation of voice in exclusionary poetics, she gains in ‘The Control Room’, the byte by byte analysis of a society that has been digitally sequenced. Though Jennifer Nelson explores and hovers in the dark underbelly of a rapidly developing ecosystem, the self-identified “radically failed perfectionist” still demands that we “counter the equations/ the sun the suN the sun the sun the Sun”. —Tatum Howey
Disharmony of the Spheres:
The Europe of Holbein's Ambassadors
By Jennifer Nelson
Published by Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020
“Disharmony of the Spheres exemplifies a genuinely new kind of early modern cultural studies. Each of Nelson’s readings displays the same ‘technical mastery’ of the protocols of the several disciplines across which the book works—art history, history of science and technology, institutional history, early modern philology, and diplomacy too—that she so admires in Holbein’s work.”—Jane O. Newman, author of Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque
The Body Where I Was Born
By Guadalupe Nettel
Translated from the original Spanish by J.T. Lichtenstein
Published by 7 Stories Press, 2015
“It has been a long time since I've found in the literature of my generation a world as personal and untransferable as that of Guadalupe Nettel.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling
Bezoar And Other Unsettling Stories
By Guadalupe Nettel
Translated from the original Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine
Published by Seven Stories Press, 2020
“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... And the title story, "Bezoar," is an intimate journal of a patient writing to a doctor. Each narrative veers towards unknown and dark corridors, and the pleasures of these accounts lie partly in the great surprise of the familiarity together with the strangeness.” — Publisher
la suma de los ceros
By Eduardo Rabasa
Published by Pepitas de Calabaza, 2015
"La suma de los ceros es una excepcional fantasía política. Eduardo Rabasa ha escrito una novela futurista ubicada en el presente; su inventiva no depende de nuevas tecnologías sino de nuevas formas de relación. Una novela sobre el más complicado de los deportes extremos: la convivencia.”—Juan Villoro
Cinta negra
By Eduardo Rabasa
Published by Pepitas de Calabaza, 2017
“La primera novela de Eduardo Rabasa es mucho más que una inteligente crítica social; contiene algunas de las páginas más literarias, mejor escritas, que he leído en mucho tiempo.” —Rebeca García Nieto, Crítico estado.
Promised Instruments
By Kristiana Rae Colón
Published by Northwestern University Press, 2013
“Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s declaration that "language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names" Kristiana Colón’s promised instruments stitches its own definitions for what is granted, what is surrendered, what is pilfered, and what is reclaimed. Her poems plumb the problem of woman’s sexuality, sexual agency, mental health, and consent with piercing musicality and disarming vulnerability. promised instruments invites its readers to interrogate their own complicity in these issues and share in the healing process.”— Publisher
No One Will See Me Cry
By Christina Rivera-Garza
Translated from the original Spanish by Andrew Hurley
Published by Curbstone Press, 2003
"One of the most notable works of fiction not only in Mexican literature but in the literature of the Spanish-speaking world at the start of the twentieth-first century ... In this novel of long dark skirts, Rivera Garza imagines, like no one else has done in Mexico since José Revueltas, the tragic options and the psychic turmoil caused by revolutionary theory and action. And she does it with such an intensity, with such a grandeur that, in conjunction with Matilda, the protagonist, we must, as readers, kneel ourselves when Diamantina dies, Cástulo gets lost, and Matilda prays for them ..." —Carlos Fuentes, El País
Grieving:
Dispatches from a Wounded Country
By Christina Rivera-Garza
Translated from the original Spanish by Sarah Booker
Published by Feminist Press at CUNY, 2020
“By one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers, this investigation into state violence and mourning weaves together personal essay and literary theory, giving voice to the political experience of collective pain.” — Publisher
The Restless Dead
Necrowriting and Disappropriation
By Christina Rivera-Garza
Translated from the original Spanish by Robin Myers
Published by Vanderbilt University Press, 2020
“Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays in this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as the center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality—a term used by anthropologist Floriberto Díaz to describe modes of life of Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor—permeating all writing processes.” —Publisher
Robinson Alone
By Kathleen Rooney
Published by Gold Wake Press, 2012
"Meet Robinson, the protagonist of Kathleen Rooney's brilliant novel-in-poems ROBINSON ALONE. Conjured up by Weldon Kees and set loose in an urban landscape, Robinson reflects and refracts mid-century American kitsch, optimism, and despair. 'What do you / think the post-war world will be like?' he asks, via Rooney's revisions and erasures of Kees' own letters. Lyrical and detailed, precise and ornate, Rooney's genre-bending text showcases an obsession with literary history. At once repulsed by Midwestern provincialism and fearful of urban excess, 'There's still as much of yesterday / as there is of tomorrow in all he does today.'“ —Carol Guess
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey
By Kathleen Rooney
Published by Penguin, 2020
“Both heartbreaking and sharply funny…Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is brilliant and surprising at every turn.” —Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer finalist for The Great Believers
La máquina autobiográfica
By Daniel Saldaña París
Published by Libros de la Mujer Rota, 2014
“La máquina autobiográfica es un texto fronterizo entre poesía y narrativa, que reflexiona acerca de la escritura del yo y la distancia que instala el uso de la primera persona. Un libro intimista, que privilegia el punto de vista personal frente a los sucesos; además de la importancia que se le da al lenguaje y las formas que asume el texto como reveladoras de sentido.”— Publisher
El nervio principal
By Daniel Saldaña París
Published by Sexto Piso, 2018
“Daniel Saldaña París ha explorado las dislocaciones que causan en el discurso poético el prosaísmo y el humor y, con múltiples recursos, ha definido una voz literaria singular.”
—Antonio Ortuño
Schoolyard of broken dreams
By Marvin Tate
Published by Tia Chucha Press, 1994
"Marvin Tate's Schoolyard of Broken Dreams reaches out, punches, grabs, wrestles to the ground, rises and stomps in an original manner. His is a voice in contemporary poetry which dares to pry from beneath the concrete places over it by history and sing." —Sterling D. Plumpp, author of Blues Narrative
Light Foot/ Pies Ligeros
By Natalia Toledo
Published by Groundwood Books, 2007
“Once upon a time no creatures on Earth died. But they had baby after baby, and before long the world grew crowded. Death decided to solve the problem by challenging everyone to a skip-rope contest -- as an immortal, Death won every time, and one by one everyone succumbed to her dare. Soon, every living being knew Death. This intriguing fable is based on Francisco Toledo's series of engravings of Death, a dominant figure in Mexican culture. Toledo, the heir to the great generation of Mexican artists that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, has imaginatively explored this integral part of life, and his entrancing images are matched by poetic text from his wife Natalia.” —Publisher
Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems
By Natalia Toledo
Translated from the original Spanish Clare Sullivan
Published by Phoneme Media, 2015
“Natalia Toledo's The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems, with an award-winning translation by Clare Sullivan, describes contemporary Isthmus Zapotec life in lush, sensual detail. In Toledo's poems of love and loss the world's population turns into fish, death is a cricket, and naked women are made of wet magma. The Black Flower won the Nezhualc yotl Prize, Mexico's highest honor for indigenous-language literature, in 2004.”—Publisher
Dragonfish
By Vu Tran
Published by W.W. Norton, 2015
"Note-perfect. Heartbreaking. Profound…[A] polished dagger of a novel that will cut out your heart." —Charles Bock, New York Times best-selling author of Beautiful Children
Antígona González
By Sara Uribe
Translated from the original Spanish by John Pluecker
Published by Les Figues Press, 2012
“As the families of so many disappeared throughout Mexico, Sara Uribe´s Antígona González roams a convulsed land looking for the body of Tadeo, her brother. As urgent as it is delicate, Antígona González summons the dead and brings them to our tables, for the day we cease sharing memory and language with them, we ourselves will become loss, vanished sign, oblivion.” — Cristina Rivera-Garza
The Blade Artist
By Irvine Welsh
Published by Vintage, 2017
While Welsh’s sense of humour is never far from the surface of his writings…this is very much a work of dark crime fiction rather than comedy or social satire with a touch of James Ellroy.”
—Hannah McGill, Scotsman
Dead Men’s Trousers
By Irvine Welsh
Published by Melville House, 2019
'No one captures the competing affections and resentments that underpin lifelong friendships like Welsh” —Esquire
A Cruelty Special to our Species
By Emily Jungmin Yoon
Published by HarperCollins, 2018
“Emily Jungmin Yoon finds language to convey its horror and violence—painfully and unsparingly, but somehow also with a delicacy, precision, and attention that does not impose the true (literal) brutality on the reader, which makes these poems all the more shocking and unforgettable.”— Amy Tan
Persona fea y ridícula
A Manual For Nothing
By Jessica Anne
Published by Noemi Press, 2017
“Often the second person is distancing and abstract, but in Jessica Anne’s a manual (for nothing) it makes an intimate hum: a girl talking to herself, to her beloved, her girls, to you. Like a hive of bees suddenly pivoting from sweet to stabby, Jessica Anne’s narrative and metaphor are at once open-hearted and painful, which makes them honest. The bodies here can love, surprise, and be hurt, just like ours.” —Mairead Case
Punto de cruz
By Jazmina Barrera
Published by Editorial Transito
“Una novela hecha de tres vidas que se cruzan como los hilos de un bordado, revelando en el haz y el envés el aprendizaje de la belleza, la solidaridad y la pérdida”. —Antonio Muñoz Molina
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Linea Nigra
By Jazmina Barrera
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Two Lines Press, 2022
“Linea Nigra narrates the period of human gestation with such estrangement that it carries it into the genre of gothic literature. A novel that both perturbs and moves the reader.”—Guadalupe Nettel, author of After the Winter
Flowers & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography
By Mario Bellatin
Translated from the Spanish by Kolin Jordan
Pulished by 7Vientos, 2014
“Using technology that doesn’t exist, a professor gives a lecture about a man living his life without a head. A writer who is missing a leg battles isolation and looks for validation among those who would be the subjects of his research. Bellatin’s writing is beautiful, odd, dislocating, and darkly funny. Bellatin’s language is simple, but each phrase is dense and intentionally vague. The journey through this book may be deceptively easy. Upon your return you’ll find that your luggage takes a very long time to unpack.”—Publisher
The Large Glass
By Mario Bellatin
Translated from the Spanish by David Shook
Published by Eyewear Publishing, 2015
“In his autobiographies, celebrated Mexican innovator Mario Bellatín recounts his childhood as a bathhouse spectacle, the treatment of an illness suffered by his Sufi spiritual mentor, and his complicated search for a quality second-hand Renault 5. Like the Duchamp sculpture from which it takes its name, Mario Bellatín's THE LARGE GLASS deconstructs the very form it embraces, revealing the artifice of the autobiographical form as well as the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves.”—Publisher
Mario Bellatin y las formas de la escritura
By Mario Bellatin
Published by Editorial A Contracorriente, 2020
“Este libro reúne la colaboración de tres importantes escritores, así como la de dieciséis destacados investigadores, en torno a la obra del escritor mexicano Mario Bellatin. Con un abordaje crítico variado y multidisciplinario, cada sección del libro resalta los distintos ejes temáticos que surgen de la misma obra de este escritor; a saber: la transliteratura, la filosofía, el cuerpo, el humor, el género y la estética. Además, el libro cuenta con un texto inédito de Mario Bellatin. En suma, se trata de un aporte crítico importante sobre la obra de uno de los escritores contemporáneos más sui generis del momento.”
Notes from No Man's Land
American Essays
By Eula Biss
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017
“I fought with this book. I shouted, ‘Amen!’ I cursed at it for being so wildly wrong and right. It’s so smart, combative, surprising, and sometimes shocking that it kept me twisting and turning in my seat like I was on some kind of socio-political roller coaster ride. Eula Biss writes with equal parts beauty and terror. I love it.” —Sherman Alexie
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy
By Daniel Borzutzky
Published by Nightboat, 2015
"A bracing new book that confronts violent action, from state sponsored torture and the bombing of civilians and other "non-essential personnel" to the collapse of the global economy, the barbarism of corporate greed, data fascism, and the deaths of immigrants attempting to cross borders. His book confronts the various horrors of our contemporary landscape through a poetry that literalizes violence, that seeks to find emotional connection and personal meaning in a world that is always exploding.” —Eileen Myles
Lake Michigan
By Daniel Borzutzky
Published by University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
“Thinking about the ways in which economic policy, racism, and militarized policing combine to shape the city, Lake Michigan's poems continue exploring the themes from Borzutzky's Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. But while the influences in this book (Césaire, Vallejo, Neruda) are international, the focus here is local as the book takes a hard look at neoliberal urbanism in the historic city of Chicago. Named a 2018 Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library.” —Book Depository
Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018
By Daniel Borzutzky
Published by Coffee House Press, 2021
“In Written after a Massacre, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unfair policing of certain kinds of bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy. He grieves for the children in cages and the martyrs of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburg. But pulsing amid Borzutzky's outrage over our era's tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice.”— Publisher
Procesos de la noche
By Diana del Ángel
Published by Almadía Ediciones, 2018
"El paisaje de fondo de estas páginas que jamás debieron escribirse nos golpea, porque en un país 'normal' esta joven ensayista estaría dedicada al estudio de la poesía de César Vallejo, Jaime Sabines y Carlos Pellicer, (...) en lugar de descender al abismo para documentar nada menos que un desollamiento, que en cualquier país del mundo –si es que se practica– es sinónimo de locura, de barbarie, de salvajismo y monstruosidad" —Elena Poniatowska
Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography
By Edgar Garcia
Published by Fence Books, 2019
“Edgar Garcia comes through with a counter-chronicle of conquest. He shows us how skins are like masks the poet and storyteller puts on and takes off, most especially when engaged with epic histories and the myths therein, changing places, changing times, and of course, changing us.” —Michael Taussig
Infinite Regress
By Edgar Garcia
Published by Bom Dia Books, 2020
“Garcia has written “poetry thick with” abstraction, exploring the role of the formal and theoretical within Ore Giron’s work through his own research and work exploring the hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas. His “Tractatus” examines the apprehensibility of origins in their visual and poetic forms, and traces a contemporary conception of origins in the knot, fold, crushed stone, haunted bone, and constellation of everyday emergencies.”—Publisher
Sudden Death
By Álvaro Enrigue
Translated from the original Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Published by Riverhead Books, 2017
“Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing ball of string. But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its surreptitiousness.”
—Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies
Formol
By Carla Faesler
Published by Tusquets, 2014
“Formol es la historia de un corazón humano y los habitantes de la casa que lo guarda pero, sobre todo, de cómo las inquietudes de cada persona tejen poco a poco la trama emocional de su pasado colectivo e individual. Relatos simultáneos, datos curiosos, apuntes de ocasión, registros de lo absurdo y notas de humor negro se unen en una prosa poco convencional, que juega con el presente y la evocación histórica, para narrar, de manera elocuente y perturbadora, la historia del corazón de México en un frasco de formol.”—Publisher
Sor Juana y otros monstruos/ and Other Monsters
By Luis Felipe Fabre
Translated from the original Spanish by JP Pluecker
Published by Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015
"As a conduit for future translations of this caliber, Senal is a sign of hope for English readers... Fabre's poems likely approach the pinnacle of such an endeavor." —Matt Bucher
Declaración de las canciones oscuras
By Luis Felipe Fabre
Published by Sexto Piso, 2019
“Declaración de las canciones oscuras es una obra de suma originalidad, donde Fabre ha conseguido capturar tanto el lenguaje y el tono como la mentalidad de la época en que transcurre la historia, al tiempo que le imprime un carácter muy actual, volviendo a contar el mito de fray Juan de la Cruz en clave contemporánea. Para ello, se vale de un registro que lo mismo roza la delicadeza poética del fraile carmelita, que utiliza el humor y el sentido del absurdo para envolver al lector en una historia que en sus manos deviene atemporal, contagiándonos del deseo místico –o no tan mísitico– que recorre de principio a fin esta prodigiosa novela.”— Publisher
Don’t Come Back
By Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
Published by Ohio State University Press, 2017
In this collection of linked lyrical and narrative essays, experimental translations, and reinterpreted myths, Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas launches into an exploration of home and identity, family history and belonging, continually examining what it means to feel familiarity but never really feel at home.” — Publisher
Auden at Work
By Rachel Galvin
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2015
“These essays from a distinguished, international group of scholars trace the process of thinking and creation in one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century. Archival and newly available materials reveal this canonical author's composition process and artistic virtuosity.”— Publisher
Elevated Threat Level
By Rachel Galvin
Published by Green Lantern Press, 2018
“These ingenious, funny-sad, empathic poems are woundingly precise in their exposure of a pattern of world-damage, of power misused 'in our name.' The recent history spotlighted in Galvin's poems is nauseating, but it's rendered with such pleasurably incisive phrasing and sonic swerve that I look up from the book awake, clarified, galvanized to face again the music and the news.” —Catherine Wagner
Empty Set
By Verónica Gerber Bicecci
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Coffee House Press, 2018
“Empty Set(ES) belongs to the set of Great Fragmentary Novels(GFN), which in turn fits plainly and simply within the set of Great Novels(GN). Verónica Gerber writes with the modesty and care of those who may seem to belong more to the set of Visual Artists(VA) than Writers(W)—each fragment is a precious miniature that exudes subtle, melancholy humor.” —Juan Pablo Villalobos
Mudanza
By Verónica Gerber Bicecci
Published by Almadía Ediciones, 2020
“Mudanza es el collage de vidas, obras y personajes con el que Verónica Gerber ha decidido responder a las preguntas que se ha hecho en su tránsito creativo. Este libro nos entrega un mapa -imaginario y posible- y una genealogía -singular y múltiple- que descubre nuevas maneras de recorrer el lenguaje y sus orillas.”—Publisher
Otro Dia
By Verónica Gerber Bicecci
Published by Almadía Ediciones, 2019
“Sencillo como gesto, pero complejo en sus implicaciones y referentes, Otro día…(poemas sintéticos), de Verónica Gerber Bicecci, es un ejercicio de cruzamientos y reescrituras que se contrapone a la figura de la musa para hacer un agudo testimonio de nuestro presente y un hondo cuestionamiento por el futuro: un tiempo que quizás haya dejado de ser el nuestro. A su vez, nos permite pensar qué tipo de memoria dejamos sobre nosotros mismo e imaginar la poesía como un satélite, un vestigio que podría ser interpretado por una nueva civilización. "—Publisher
Tratado de la infidelidad
By Julián Herbert
Published by Malpaso Editorial, 2017
“Eso sí, Plascencia y Herbert no pierden el sentido del humor. Negro, por fuerza, para estar a la altura de las circunstancias. Cuando se enfrentan en serio a asuntos tan serios como el deseo y la infidelidad, no queda más que asomarse a aspectos sumamente sórdidos de los seres humanos.” —Rodrigo Pinto
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The House of The Pain of Others
By Julián Herbert
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Graywolf Press, 2019
“The great strength of Herbert’s book, written with such shame and fury, is that it is not framed as epitaph but as dispatch from a live crime scene, attentive to the silences, the still seething resentments, relinquishing nothing to history.”—The New York Times
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
By Julián Herbert
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Graywolf Press, 2020
“Herbert . . . is a deft explorer of the darker corners of Mexican society. . . . The title story is a tour de force. . . . [Herbert is] a writer worth seeking out.”—Kirkus Reviews
La Memoria de las Cosas
By Gabriela Jauregui
Published by SEXTO PISO, 2013
"Outstanding ... Gabriela Jauregui displays a perfect tone: her prose dazzles because of the breadth of its spectrum, the scope and the empathy it reaches but, above all, because of her true passion." —Marjorie Perloff
Many Fiestas!
By Gabriela Jauregui
Published by Gato Negro, 2017
“Gabriela Jauregui, young mexican author, thinking in the new bloody Mexican reality of the war against drugs and the cartels, proposes a communally organized resistance against individualism and isolation in a playful and enjoyable spirit using words lifted from many different manifestos. A manifesto as a remix, unleashing a different political potential.” — Publisher
The Instructions
By Adam Levin
Published by McSweeney's, 2010.
"Young Adam Levin wowed me with this whip-smart, aching, hilarious novel, starring his own kind of post-modern wise child (a la Seymour Glass) and revolutionary. The ghost of DF Wallace would relish comparisons to this brave new talent. This year's best debut by a country mile."—Mary Karr
My Only Wife
By Jac Jemc
Published by Dzanc Books, 2012
"Jac Jemc's My Only Wife operates with the calm, pristine clarity of an enormous marble room. In moving, methodically arranged sentences, one comes across the surpassing surfaces and relics of a kind of intimacy that seems an increasingly difficult proposition to rightly preserve. At last, here is a novel concerned with timeless dedication, love, and respect, which phrased through Jac Jemc's steady warming eye needs no punchline or coincidence or cataclysm to give true glow to the glow itself." —Blake Butler, author of There is No Year
False Bingo
By Jac Jemc
Published by FSG, 2019
“In Jac Jemc’s dislocating second story collection, False Bingo, we watch as sinister forces—some supernatural, some of this earth, some real and some not—work their ways into the mundanity of everyday life.” —Publisher
Lessons on Expulsion
By Erika L. Sánchez
Published by GrayWolf, 2017
"A rare one with phosphorescent night-powers & deep-fire mind tools, Erika L. Sánchez―here's her ground-crackling first poetry volume. A prize-eater."―Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate
Hot Pink
By Adam Levin
Published by McSweeney, 2012
"Hot Pink leaves readers wondering what might be lurking nearby, on the verge of uprooting their own lives." —Chicago Magazine
Todo Nada
By Brenda Lozano
Published by Tusquets, 2009
“Dos personajes extremadamente opuestos son los protagonistas de esta novela: el anciano Emilio Nassar, un médico reconocido, y Emilia, su nieta, una joven estudiante de literatura. Esta es la historia de la relación entre el abuelo y Emilia en el último año de vida del viejo. El encuentro inicia mientras Emilio Nassar sobrevive a la partida de su único amor y la joven termina con su primer pareja sentimental: en esa tierra de nadie que es la vida se enfrentan los personajes de esta pequeña obra maestra, escrita con inmensa libertad, precoz sabiduría literaria y una inmejorable intuición para el humor y la catástrofe.” — Publisher
Cómo piensan las piedras
By Brenda Lozano
Published by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2017
“Nos estrellamos contra lo que más queremos. Esta colección de cuentos reúne sucesos de la vida cotidiana que se encuentran con eventos inusuales. Por ejemplo, que una niña pequeña se ponga a dialogar con un policía y le haga preguntas de toda índole, en particular una sobre las piedras; por ejemplo, que una creciente manada de elefantes reconozca como parte de los suyos a un hombre. Y que una pareja se imagine historias a partir de los ruidos que escuchan en el vecindario.” — Publisher
Brujas
By Brenda Lozano
Published by ALFAGUARA, 2020
"Un vórtice de gravedad que condensa toda la literatura de Brenda Lozano, donde conviven lo oral y lo escrito, las tradiciones populares y cierta perspectiva cosmopolita, el humor y la tragedia. Una inyección de electricidad, una música que se sigue escuchando mucho más allá de sus páginas.” —Mauro Libertella
Sidewalks
By Valeria Luiselli
Published by Coffee House Press, 2014
“‘A writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces.’ What a pleasure to wander through Valeria Luiselli’s meditative, precisely constructed landscapes of the city and interior. To read her essays is to have access to a map, a history, an passionate library, a thoughtful gaze, a sensitive and beautiful mind.” —Kate Zambreno
Tell Me How it Ends
By Valeria Luiselli
Published by Coffee House Press, 2017
“In an essay as bracing as it is searing, the incomparable Valeria Luiselli explores the 2014 immigration crisis. Luiselli writes with a clarity that underscores the nightmarish conditions and nonsensical bureaucracy undocumented children face on their passage to America and toward U.S. citizenship. Tell Me How It Ends evokes empathy as it educates. It is a vital contribution to the body of post-Drumpf work being published in early 2017.” —Katharine Solheim, Unabridged Books
Cuaderno De Edimburgo
By Valerie Mejer Caso
Published by AMARGORD, EDICIONES, 2013.
Un hermano ¿murió fuera del número 5 de West Register Street, Edimburgo¿ y hubo una maltrecha huida de animal herido. Dos antecedentes en estado sólido y líquido y a la vez, dos hitos que nos confunden porque marcan un mismo lugar; dos piedras a cada margen del único camino, aquel que recorrimos hacia atrás y hacia delante, el constructo que nos guía con su doloroso retorno de migajas a los espacios inviolables: la infancia, el amor, la amistad, el desengaño y también la literatura. Es el libro de Valerie Mejer un desgranado ejercicio de exorcismo que nos hace visible que tanto la vida como el arte son procesos de encadenadas muertes. —Publisher
de la ol, el atajo
By Valerie Mejer Caso
Published by Ediciones Amargord, 2009
“Pocas veces uno experimenta como en esta poesía la sensación de que ella es un escenario donde se está representando el fulgor íntimo y a la vez cósmico de la existencia de un solo ser humano: de la poeta, haciéndonos entender de nuevo que sólo el arte es capaz de otorgarle a los hechos la piedad que ellos en sí mismos jamás tienen y que, por ende, sólo él puede en parte corregir la experiencia y darnos la posibilidad de un relato redimido. La obra de Valerie Mejer nos muestra permanentemente esa posibilidad, de allí parte, pero sólo parte, de su grandeza y verdad.” —Enciclopedia de la literatura en Mexico
Esta Novela Azul
By Valerie Mejer Caso
Published by El Tucán de Virginia, 2004
1989, The Number
By Nate Marshall and Kevin Coval
Published by Haymarket Books, 2016
“1989, the number is an exploration of the year 1989 through politics, personal history and culture. This chapbook plays like a mixtape incorporating the hottest records and stories of 89 and reflecting their relevance for today.”— Publisher
Finna
By Nate Marshall
Published by Random House Publishing Group, 2020
“Terrific . . . illuminates life in this country in a strikingly original way.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Temporada de huracanes
By Fernanda Melchor
Published by Random House Literature, 2017
“Fernanda Melchor no sólo escribe con la potencia rabiosa que le reclaman los temas que ha decidido investigar, sino que en cada página muestra un oído y una agudeza pocas veces vista en nuestra literatura.” —Yuri Herrera
Aquí no es Miami
By Fernanda Melchor
Published by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2018
“Lo que su libro hace es manifestar la ignominia en toda esta rudeza.
Aquí no es Miami es un libro de crónicas devastador, luminoso y emotivo. Con facilidad nos lleva de la mano por toda una gama de sentimientos que van de la compasión al asombro, de la dulzura a la impiedad. Parece que está escrito por un sobreviviente, o, digamos, por un exconvicto.
El ojo de Fernanda Melchor es implacable. Mira por nosotros. Nos ahorra el trabajo de desplazarnos a Veracruz y de atisbar en las oquedades más profundas de aquellos hombres forjados en la lucha por la sobrevivencia.” —Publisher
Páradais
By Fernanda Melchor
Published by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2021
“Fernanda Melchor explora la violencia y la desigualdad en esta novela brutal. Lo hace con una destreza técnica deslumbrante, oído absoluto para la oralidad y precisión de neurocirujana para la crueldad. Páradais es un breve e inexorable descenso al infierno.” —Mariana Enríquez
El cuerpo en que nací
By Guadalupe Nettel
Published by Editorial Anagrama, 2011
“Es un libro que en apenas doscientas páginas consigue aunar y resolver impecablemente tres objetivos. Primero, narrar una historia de iniciación y aprendizaje. Segundo, plasmar cómo se construye una mirada literaria. Y, por último, dotar al relato de una carga moral que conmueve: la de una madre que desvela sus dudas al educar a sus hijos y que recuerda cómo la educaron a ella en el pasado. Está en la línea de mi propia literatura, y de lo han publicado también este año Patricio Pron y Alejandro Zambra” —Marcos Giralt Torrente, El Cultural
After the Winter
By Guadalupe Nettel
Translated from the original Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
Published by Coffee House Press, 2018
"Nettel has brilliantly found a form to contain the multitudes of what one body can hold." ―Nick Flynn
La hija única
By Guadalupe Nettel
Published by ANAGRAMA, 2022
“Tres mujeres enfrentadas a la maternidad. Tres maneras de afrontarla. Una intensa y deslumbrante novela sobre la familia en el mundo actual. Poco después de cumplir los ocho meses de embarazo, a Alina le anuncian que su hija no podrá sobrevivir al nacimiento. Ella y su compañero emprenden entonces un doloroso pero también sorprendente proceso de aceptación y duelo. Ese último mes de gestación se convierte para ellos en una extraña oportunidad para conocer a esa hija a la que tanto trabajo les cuesta renunciar.” — Publisher
A Zero-Sum Game
By Eduardo Rabasa
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Deep Vellum Publishing, 2016
"Outstanding political fantasy. Eduardo Rabasa has written a futuristic novel set in the present; its inventiveness is not based on new technologies but rather on new kinds of relationships." — Juan Villoro
El destino es un conejo que te da órdenes
By Eduardo Rabasa
Published by Pepitas de Calabaza, 2019
“Eduardo Rabasa nos sumerge, en su segunda novela, en un mundo sofocante, dominado por la ambición desmedida. Los personajes de Cinta negra están dispuestos a morir y a matar por obtener un ascenso social que no lleva a ningún lugar. La lucidez y el elegantísimo humor negro de esta novela me recordaron otras sátiras sociales memorables, como las de George Orwell, Chuck Palahniuk y Álex de la Iglesia.” — Felipe Restrepo Pombo, Gatopardo.
Octagon
By Kristiana Rae Colón
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015
“Colón's script includes some beautiful poetry. And there are certain moments that are so well acted, so poignant, that they bring tears to the audience's eyes.” — New Statesman
Nadie me verá llorar
Published by Grupo Planeta - México, 2013
“Corre el año 1920 y Joaquín Buitrago, que por azares de su atormentada vida acaba dedicándose a fotografiar a los internos del manicomio La Castañeda, se topa de pronto, entre las mujeres a las que retrata, con Matilda Burgos. Obsesionado por la identidad de esta enferma, pues cree haberla conocido años atrás en el célebre burdel La Modernidad, trata de recabar información sobre ella. Como Joaquín descubre poco a poco, Matilda, nacida en los campos donde se cultiva la olorosa vainilla, llegó de niña a la capital para caer en manos de un pariente que la utilizó para poner en práctica una singular teoría médico-social.” —Publisher
Autobiografía del Algodón / The Autobiography of Cotton
By Christina Rivera-Garza
Published by LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE, 2020
“The Autobiography of Cotton provides a new and extraordinary signifier to the territory of the northern border of Mexico, that here raises up majestically upon the nomadic movement and the route of memories." — Yásnaya Elena Aguilar
O, Democracy!
By Kathleen Rooney
Published by Fifth Star Press, 2014
“With O Democracy!, Kathleen Rooney makes a swift and seamless transition from poetry to fiction, pairing her skill for image with a fresh voice, humor, and a keen eye for the political world she navigates here. An exciting debut.”
—Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
By Kathleen Rooney
Published by St. Martin’s Press, 2017
“Prescient and quick....A perfect fusing of subject and writer, idea and ideal.” —Chicago Tribune
The Listening Room
By Kathleen Rooney
Published by Spork Press, 2018
“The house is haunted but nobody’s home. Only us chickens, standing still as sculpture while Loulou, the immortal Pomeranian, & Georgette, Magritte’s guardian angel, take us on a tour of the asylum.” —Publisher
En medio de extrañas víctimas
By Daniel Saldaña París
Published by Sexto Piso, 2013
“Desenfadado y socarrón pero también vulnerable y diáfano, el lenguaje de Saldaña París le estalla en la cara al lector: un resplandor.”
—Valeria Luiselli
Among Strange Victims
By Daniel Saldaña París
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Coffee House Press, 2016
“Great fun are the jabs at academia, Mexico City and the dusty town where the action, or inaction, moves after Rodrigo meets Marcelo, a Spanish cretin with a Ph.D. in aesthetics. These flameless flâneurs humph and hump, personifying urban malaise.” —New York Times Sunday Book Review
Ramifications
By Daniel Saldaña París
Translated from the original Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Published by Coffee House Press, 2020
“[S]trange and elegant. . . . París brilliantly explores memory, masculinity, and familial drama in equal measure. The result is an affecting account of arrested development.” —Publishers Weekly
Action in the Orchards
By Fred Schmalz
Published by Nightboat Books, 2019
The strength of Schmalz works lays in his willingness to conceal or reveal the source material. This frees the poems from the sources while not always detaching them from a tether to meaning. He approaches ekphrasis with nimbleness that serves the work and the reader well.
—Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Your Impossible Voice
The Amazing Mister Orange
By Marvin Tate
Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, 2014
“Outsider poetry inspired by Ainsworth Rosewell, self-professed genius and con man who committed suicide in 1996 by jumping from the seventh floor of the Water Tower Mall. Subjects include relationships, death, sex, drugs, dogs, immortality, and Chicago, all exploding with nontraditional humor and vibrant characters, both real and imagined.” —Publisher
Cuento del Conejo y el Coyote
By Natalia Toledo
Published by Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008
“Una historia retomada de la tradición oral zapoteca en la que se narra por qué el coyote siempre le aúlla a la Luna. Un conejo roba chiles en una huerta y el campesino le tiende una trampa para cazarlo. A punto de ser cocinado, el conejo ve al coyote, quien por ayudarlo toma su lugar y es batido. Así comienza una cadena de aventuras donde el astuto conejo burla una y otra vez al coyote. Con este libro el FCE da continuidad a un proyecto iniciado en 2005, cuando se publicó La Muerte pies ligeros, a fin de contribuir a la preservación de las lenguas indígenas. Se trata de una edición trilingüe, en español, zapoteco e inglés, y se publica en coedición con la Galería Arvil, en una edición empastada de la colección Tezontle.” —Publisher
Deche bitoope
By Natalia Toledo
Published by Almadia Editions, 2020
"En Juchitán, Oaxaca, los poetas venden fruta e iguanas en el mercado, giran en torno al quiosco del sexo en la eterna ronda del dámelo porque yo te quiero y se esconden tras el tronco de los árboles como Natalia Toledo." —Elena Poniatowska
Siam
By Sara Uribe
Published by Educal, 2012
“Sara Uribe's is a voice in which memory, illness and mourning are intertwined; in a scriptural fabric marked by experimentation. In it, the author achieves an interesting counterpoint between the weight of the autobiographical element - the death of a sister - and the expression of the poems that, at times, border on a playful formulation. Siam is also an exercise in self-exploration.”—Publisher
A Decent Ride
By Irvine Welsh
Published by Random House UK, 2016
“Packed with filthy charm and characters old and new, it was a comic triumph with plenty of depth through its exploitation of celebrity culture and the treatment of sex workers.”— Rowena McIntosh, The List
Rave
By Irvine Welsh
Published by Penguin Random House, 2018
“Irvine Welsh, 'poet laureate of the chemical generation', exposes the seamy underbelly of rave's utopian dream. Lloyd, our permanently pilled-up protagonist, pushes his weekends to breaking point and beyond in this frazzled trip through Scottish clubland. He experiences the vertiginous uppers and downers of the Second Summer of Love, dabbles in a spot of disc jockeying and closes in, gradually, on some kind of redemption...”— Publisher
The Seal Club
By Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, and John King
Published by London Books, 2020
“The Seal Club is a three-novella collection by the authors Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh and John King, three stories that capture their ongoing interests and concerns, stories that reflect bodies of work that started with Morvern Callar, Trainspotting and The Football Factory - all best-sellers, all turned into high-profile films.” — Publisher
Ordinary Misfortunes
By Emily Jungmin Yoon
Published by Tupelo Press, 2017
“I’m completely taken in by these poems, how they deftly balance lyric and narrative, history and the present, body and mind. These are poems of violence – against women, and against Korean women in particular – but they are also poems about the pain and pleasure in language itself: ‘pear in Korean is a homonym for ship or boat’; ‘A homonym for apple is apology.’ Ordinary Misfortunes is a remarkable collection.” —Maggie Smith
The Gringo Champion
By Aura Xilonen
Published by Europa Editions UK, 2017
Translated from the original Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg
“Liborio has to leave Mexico, a land that has taught him little more than a keen instinct for survival. He crosses the Rio Bravo, like so many others, to reach "the promised land." And in a barrio like any other, in some gringo city, this illegal immigrant tells his story.” — Publisher
