A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans. Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future. Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez's time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera's fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.From the author of A Silent Fury, available Summer 2020.
A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by one of Mexico's finest novelists (Vulture).
The characters that populate Yuri Herrera's surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, these very short stories are an inspired extension of this significant writer's work. In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meager bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Yuri Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition. In Ten Planets, Herrera's consistent themes--the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms--are explored with evident brilliance and delight.The Mexico we hear of in the news--the drug cartels, migration and senseless violence--is rich soil for Herrera's moving stories of people who live in this reality but also live in the timeless realm of myth, epic and fairy tale, such as the singer Lobo in Kingdom Cons who loves the drug lord's own daughter, Makina who crosses borders to find her brother in Signs Preceding the End of the World, and the Redeemer, a hard-boiled hero looking to broker peace between feuding families during a pandemic in The Transmigration of Bodies.
These three novels get to the heart of the matter in a truly original way. They are storytelling that is at once timely and timeless.
From the author of A Silent Fury, available Summer 2020.
Herrera is Mexico's greatest novelist.--Francisco Goldman
Herrera's novels are like little lights in a vast darkness. I want to see whatever he shows me.--Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books
The Transmigration of Bodies goes straight for the soul.--John Powers, NPR Fresh Air
In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part crime romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.
Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Yuri Herrera's English-language debut Signs Preceding the End of the World won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. His follow-up The Transmigration of Bodies has built on the critical and popular success of its predecessor. He teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Lisa Dillman is a US translator based in Atlanta, Georgia, where she translates Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American writers and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. She won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award for her translation of Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World.
From the author of A Silent Fury, available Summer 2020.
Mine fire industrial disaster nonfiction from the bestselling author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.