"Cristina Rivera Garza is a literary powerhouse. Reading her short fiction is like staring at a distant object-- a bird? a tower? and using your imperfect human eyes to try to make it come into focus, but the more it comes into focus, the more complex it becomes, until you are straining your eyes to take in the details that you know are just beyond the edge of sight. This collection draws from across 30 years of writing and includes a story that I read months before I wrote this and cannot stop thinking about. I won't tell you which one. "
Publisher New York Review of Books
Publication Date 2022-04-19
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781948980098
A story collection drawn from across her career brings into English for the first time the extraordinary stylistic and thematic range of the Mexican writer and MacArthur “genius” Cristina Rivera Garza.
“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018 about Cristina Rivera Garza, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: She was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction that “interrogates culturally constructed notions of language, memory, and gender from a transnational perspective,” and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.
New and Selected Stories now brings together in English translation stories from across Rivera Garza’s career, drawing from three collections spanning over 30 years and including new writing not yet published in Spanish. It is a unique and remarkable body of work, and a window into the ever-evolving stylistic and thematic development of one of the boldest, most original and affecting writers in the world today.
