Valeria Luiselli

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, 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. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained–or lost in the desert along the way.

"Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin-American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction of the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants with the reality of racism and fear--both here and back home"--

A dazzling follow-up to the novel Faces in the Crowd , this collection of literary peregrinations around the margins of metropolitan life demonstrates Valeria Luiselli's equal virtuosity as a writer of non-fiction. Evocative, erudite and consistently surprising, these narrative essays explore the places - real and imagined - that shape our lives. Whether wandering the familiar streets of her neighbourhood, revisiting the landmarks of her past, or getting lost in a foreign city, Valeria Luiselli plots a unique and exhilarating course that traces unexpected pathways between diverse ideas and reveals the world from a fresh perspective. Here, we follow Luiselli as she cycles around Mexico City, shares a cigarette with the night porter in her Harlem apartment, and hunts down a poet's tomb in Venice. Each location sparks Luiselli's nimble curiosity and prompts imaginative reflections on topics as varied as the fluidity of identity, the elusiveness of words that can't be translated, the competing methods of arranging a bookcase, and the way that city-dwellers evade eye-contact with their neighbours, while spying on their lives. Sidewalks cements Luiselli's reputation as one of Latin America's most original, smart and exciting new literary voices.

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes, six English-speaking authors and six Spanish-speaking authors have collected 12 original and previously unpublished stories as their tribute to the international influence of these two giants of world literature. An introduction by Salman Rushdie explores the legacy of the two men in contemporary fiction. Don Quixote and the ambuiguity of reading / Ben Okri -- Mir Aslam of Kolachi / Kamila Shamsie -- The dogs of war / Juan Gabriel Vásquez ; translator: Anne McLean -- Coriolanus / Yuri Herrera ; translator: Lisa Dillman -- Glass / Nell Leyshon -- Opening windows / Marcos Giralt Torrente ; translator: Samantha Schnee -- The piano bar / Hisham Matar -- The secret life of Shakespeareans / Soledad Puértolas ; translator: Rosalind Harvey -- Egyptian puppet / Vicente Molina Foix ; translator: Frank Wynne -- The glass woman / Deborah Levy -- The anthology massacre / Rhidian Brook -- Shakespeare, New Mexico / Valeria Luiselli ; translator: Christiana MacSweeney.

Papeles falsos, primer libro de Valeria Luiselli, está compuesto por una serie de ensayos narrativos de temas diversos, donde la constante es el registro de la original mirada de la autora, siempre presta a encontrar detalles o conexiones entre ideas de muy diverso orden, ecos de un pensamiento que por fuerza obliga al lector a repensar. La escondida tumba de Brodsky en Venecia; la inclasificable y elusiva saudade portuguesa; el lenguaje como ruptura con la ±infancia previa a la infancia?, son algunos de los ingeniosos pretextos para el despliegue de una escritura precisa, que nos deja la impresión de estar presenciando en persona esas particularidades, guiados por un lúcido filtro que sugiere múltiples variaciones de una realidad que se transforma con el pasar de su lectura. De Valeria Luiselli, el médico y escritor Francisco González Crussi ha dicho: ±De entre el bronco zumbido, disonante y confuso, del habla de millares de jóvenes escritores contemporáneos, la voz de Valeria Luiselli se destaca con la límpida hermosura de un toque de clarín, ya sea que nos hable de hechos triviales de la vida cotidiana, como andar en bicicleta, que medite melancólica entre las tumbas de un cementerio, que deje suelta su imaginación, o que la ate con la doble traílla de la erudición y el razonamiento, en todos los casos la joven autora de Papeles falsos encuentra la imagen brillante y evocadora, la citación feliz, y la expresión justa. Esta convergencia de cualidades le confiere a su obra un doble poder: nos deleita y al mismo tiempo nos descubre nuevos y múltiples significados en los objetos de la experiencia cotidiana. Leer este libro nos produce el efecto de un bellísimo recital, en el que hay una especie de riqueza musical y gran densidad o espesor armónico. Valeria Luiselli se revela aquí, sin ninguna duda, como magnífica ensayista y una de las mayores promesas de las letras mexicanas?. --

"This an anthology of short stories from the thirty-nine best Latin American authors under forty is being published in conjunction with the Hay Festival. With authors from fifteen different countries, this really is a diverse collection of stories that will transport readers to a whole host of new worlds and showcase the best writing coming out of Latin America today. The chosen authors include Valeria Luiselli, Samanta Schweblin and Laia Jufresa. Their stories have been translated into English by a group of the finest translators around, including familiar names such as Daniel Hahn and Christina MacSweeney as well as many new and exciting talents. The anthology was launched at the Hay Festival in 2018 with events bringing many of the authors and translators together to celebrate these fantastic authors and their stories." -- Provided by publisher.

"Bon vivant, world traveler, auctioneer--the story of Highway and his teeth is like Johnny Cash meets Robert Walser in Mexico"--