A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF 2024

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR

Short, strange, spiky and sublime. --Dwight Garner, New York Times

Funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous. --Wall Street Journal

From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory colonial revenge story.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan - today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés is accompanied by his captains, his troops, his prized horses, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn friar, and Malinalli, an enslaved, strategic Nahua princess. After nearly bungling their entrance to the city, the Spaniards are greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely Aztec princess Atotoxtli, sister and wife of Moctezuma. As they await their meeting with the emperor - who is at a political and spiritual crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get by - Cortés and his entourage are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés's captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the chances of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire. And what if... they don't?

You Dreamed of Empires brings Tenochtitlan to life at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Álvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counterattack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF 2024

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR

Short, strange, spiky and sublime. --Dwight Garner, New York Times

Funny, ghastly, eye-opening, marvelous. --Wall Street Journal

From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory colonial revenge story.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan - today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés is accompanied by his captains, his troops, his prized horses, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn friar, and Malinalli, an enslaved, strategic Nahua princess. After nearly bungling their entrance to the city, the Spaniards are greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely Aztec princess Atotoxtli, sister and wife of Moctezuma. As they await their meeting with the emperor - who is at a political and spiritual crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get by - Cortés and his entourage are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés's captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the chances of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire. And what if... they don't?

You Dreamed of Empires brings Tenochtitlan to life at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Álvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counterattack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.

A debut collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny stories about Mexican women who fight, skirt, cheat, cry, kill, and lie their way to survival.

Life's a bitch. That's why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she's foaming at the mouth. In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life and become her. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once a work of black humor and social critique, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico's most thrilling new writers.

Winner of the 2020 Mauricio Achar Award

Does evil lurk in the shadows of the forest or within the human heart? Eduardo Sangarcía's tale of one woman's trial opens the door to deeper horrors.

Anna Thalberg is a villager shunned for her red hair and provocative beauty, so when she is dragged from her home and accused of witchcraft, her neighbors do not intervene. Only Klaus, her husband, and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, set out to Würzburg to prove her innocence. There, locked in a prison tower, Anna faces isolation and torture while anxiety builds over strange happenings within the city walls. Can the two men convince the Church inquisitors to release Anna, or will she burn at the stake?

The Trial of Anna Thalberg is a tale of religious persecution, superstition, and suffering during the Protestant Reformation. While mapping the medieval fear of occultism and demons, it delves into enduring human concerns: the oppression of women, the inhumanity of institutions, and the question of God's existence. Frantic in pace and experimental in form, this is an unforgettable debut from Mexican author Eduardo Sangarcía.

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor--an attractive married woman and mother--while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society--with its racist, classist, hyper violent tendencies--and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

The beguiling story of a young journalist whose investigation of a murder leads her to the most legendary healer in all of Mexico, from one of the most prominent voices of a new generation of Latin American writers

Paloma is dead. But before she was murdered, before she was even Paloma, she was a traditional healer named Gaspar. Before she was murdered, she taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of the ceremonies known as veladas, and about the Language and the Book that unlock their secrets.

Sent to report on Paloma's murder, Zoe meets Feliciana in the mountain village of San Felipe. There, the two women's lives twist around each other in a danse macabre. Feliciana tells Zoe the story of her struggle to become an accepted healer in her community, and Zoe begins to understand the hidden history of her own experience as a woman, finding her way in a hostile environment shaped by and for men.

Weaving together two parallel narratives that mirror and refract one another, this extraordinary novel envisions the healer as storyteller and the writer as healer, and offers a generous and nuanced understanding of a world that can be at turns violent and exultant, cruel and full of hope.

A story of the world's repeated failure to control feminine power and the sheer magic of language itself. An enthralling, passionate story about secrets both holy and profane. --Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Nobody Is Ever Missing

Based on a trip to the now abandoned Mexican mercury mining town of San Felipe Nuevo Mercurio, The Company explores the development of mercury mining as a technology and its present environmental consequences, both predictable and unforeseen, in what Cristina Rivera Garza terms an exemplary disappropriative work.

In a book that subverts both textual and graphic expectations, part a involves a rewriting of Amparo Dávila's The Houseguest, changing specific aspects of the text: verb tenses are transposed to the future; the houseguest becomes the menacing presence of The Company; and the domestic helper who suffers the intimidation of The Company along with her unnamed female employer is the machine. In part b, scientific reports dating from the 1950s to the present day, conversations with experts and miners, and excerpts from the story of Long, Tall José construct a history of mercury mining in the area and the subsequent environmental contamination. In both sections, text is accompanied by images that range from Gerber Bicecci's intervened photographs of the ghost town and the surrounding area to technical diagrams and reinterpreted maps, plus pictograms from Manuel Felguérez's La máquina estética (1975).

As Rivera Garza says in her epilogue, Gerber Bicecci moves us toward the past and the future, without for an instant forgetting the present we share . . . Nothing is at peace here, everything is at stake.

A Southwest Review Must Read Book of 2024
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2024

In this debut novel, Clyo Mendoza, a young, award-winning Mexican poet and novelist, weaves together multiple narratives into a lyrical, shape-shifting existential reflection on love, violence, and the power of myth.

Fury has the poetic and wild force of the desert. In its pages there is tenderness, fear and forceful, rhythmic writing with images that are difficult to forget. It is about the violence of desire that turns us into dogs that drool, howl and bite, but also about love in the midst of hostility and helplessness. This is why it is a disturbing and, at the same time, deeply moving novel. --Mónica Ojeda

A beguiling and enticing fever dream of sex and violence in the Mexican desert. . . . This is impossible to put down. --Publishers Weekly, starred review

In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and hallucinating from heat and thirst, mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men--and of their mothers, lovers and companions--Mendoza explores her characters' passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them.

After winning the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness, incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters' destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.

An amazing, hypnotic and beautiful novel, like contemplating the desert. --Juan Pablo Villalobos

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor--an attractive married woman and mother--while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme.

Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society--with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies--and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

The beguiling story of a young journalist whose investigation of a murder leads her to the most legendary healer in all of Mexico, from one of the most prominent voices of a new generation of Latin American writers

Paloma is dead. But before she was murdered, before she was even Paloma, she was a traditional healer named Gaspar. Before she was murdered, she taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of the ceremonies known as veladas, and about the Language and the Book that unlock their secrets.

Sent to report on Paloma's murder, Zoe meets Feliciana in the mountain village of San Felipe. There, the two women's lives twist around each other in a danse macabre. Feliciana tells Zoe the story of her struggle to become an accepted healer in her community, and Zoe begins to understand the hidden history of her own experience as a woman, finding her way in a hostile environment shaped by and for men.

Weaving together two parallel narratives that mirror and refract one another, this extraordinary novel envisions the healer as storyteller and the writer as healer, and offers a generous and nuanced understanding of a world that can be at turns violent and exultant, cruel and full of hope.

A story of the world's repeated failure to control feminine power and the sheer magic of language itself. An enthralling, passionate story about secrets both holy and profane. --Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Nobody Is Ever Missing

In a gripping, atmospheric new novel by acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París, three friends forever bound by erotic flames of the past reunite in a city engulfed by wildfires and an ecstatic dancing plague

After years apart, three high school friends return to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where an intense love triangle once left an indelible mark on their adolescence. The city, surrounded by a ring of claustrophobic wildfires, brings out the past and confronts them with their present: they must once again face the entanglement of friendship and desire, the seemingly distant discovery of sexuality, complex parental relationships, and the daunting task of artistic fulfillment.

In the background, two forces of chaos and destruction are a constant presence. As fires ravage the physical landscape, one of the friends begins choreographing an ecstatic dance inspired by the German expressionist Mary Wigman and medieval Danse Macabre. What starts as a coping mechanism for the anxieties of youth and climate catastrophe becomes an overpowering, all-consuming hysteria. Mysterious powers are awakened, the boundary between reality and myth begins to blur, and the friends find themselves immersed in an increasingly turbulent and uncertain universe.

El 2 de octubre no se olvida. A partir de testimonios de víctimas, estudiantes, maestros, padres de familia, periodistas, intelectuales, así como de agentes del estado opresor y de quienes no simpatizaban con la causa, se hilan los tensos momentos alrededor de la represión del Movimiento Estudiantil de 1968 que sembraría una nueva conciencia política y que no pudo ser silenciado ni por el más cruel de los autoritarismos: el que asesina a los jóvenes y les roba sus sueños.

La Biblioteca Elena Poniatowska reúne la obra narrativa, ensayística y periodística de la autora que ha trascendido fronteras y se ha convertido en referente por su escritura comprometida y su pasión por las causas sociales. Nueva y definitiva edición de uno de los libros fundamentales del siglo xx, La noche de Tlatelolco es el recuento puntual de una tragedia, pero también el del surgimiento de una ciudadanía que asumió su papel en la historia.

Nellie Campobello, a prominent Mexican writer and novelist of the Revolution, played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, along with such writers as Rafael Muñoz and Gregorio López y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others. Her two novellas, Cartucho (first published in 1931) and My Mother's Hands (first published as Las manos de Mamá in 1938), are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the Revolution in the north of Mexico, where Pancho Villa was a popular hero and a personal friend of her family, show not only the stark realism of Cartucho but also the tender lyricism of My Mother's Hands. They are noteworthy, too, as a first-person account of the female experience in the early years of the Mexican Revolution and unique in their presentation of events from a child's perspective.

Tras compartir una década con Diego Rivera en París, Angelina Beloff sufre la muerte de su hijo y la partida de su amante a México. En el estudio del pintor, la atenaza la soledad de los años de posguerra en Europa y ni siquiera en la pintura encuentra consuelo. Su catarsis son las cartas que le escribe, que nunca tienen respuesta y la hacen venir a México.

La Biblioteca Elena Poniatowska reúne la obra narrativa, ensayística y periodística de la autora que ha trascendido fronteras y se ha convertido en un referente por su capacidad inigualable de explorar distintos géneros. En Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela la literatura vuelve a hacer gala de su capacidad para emocionarnos y descubrir nuestro potencial creativo en el desamor.

Charras is the true story of Efraín El Charras Calderón Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatean government's successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaimed Mexican novelist Hernán Lara Zavala combines real-life newspaper articles and interviews with renderings of key events, laying the state-sanctioned narrative of Charras's death beside the actual experiences of those involved. To kaleidoscopic effect, Zavala enters not only the mind of the hero but also those in his orbit: the governor of the Yucatán, Charras's bureaucrat brother-in-law, even the mercenary hired to carry out the kidnapping--the chilling you whose point-of-view the reader must inhabit to unravel what took place during that fateful spring of 1974.

From the author of Witches, a gripping, kaleidoscopic tale of two women in 1940s Mexico--one whose daughter has just been kidnapped and another who has just adopted a little girl

When the kidnapping of a little girl shocks the Mexican capital, the lives of two very different women become forever intertwined. Gloria Felipe lives a comfortable upper-class life with her husband and five children. Nuria Valencia comes from a working-class background and has been desperately trying to get pregnant in order to save her marriage. After traditional methods produce no results, she subjects herself to horrific fertility treatments designed and administered by men, and ultimately tries to adopt but is rejected on the basis that a woman in her early thirties is too old to adopt a baby. Failed time and again by the system and about to lose hope, she is presented with an opportunity that seems almost too good to be true.

Through the eyes of a wry unnamed narrator, we witness the battle of the Felipe family to recover their youngest member and the anguished attempts of the Valencia family to save their daughter from potential danger. With the twists and turns of a thriller, and Brenda Lozano's sharp yet poignant sense of humor, the novel asks how far mothers are willing to go in the name of love for their children, and at what cost.

A horror-infused, polyphonic work about the violence and cruelty seething in a late-70s Guadalajara neighborhood

At a traveling fair, a young girl visiting with her family will ask a serpent woman to tell her future. The serpent woman's answer is cryptic, but back in their neighborhood, the lives of the girl and her sister will be haunted by a ghost and a boa as their world shimmers between the real and unreal.

The Summer of the Serpent gives us a multifaceted, multi-textured look at the sisters, their family, and their neighbors caught in the seething forces afflicting the neighborhood through the summer. Though this will be Ceclia Eudave's first novel to be translated into English, the New York Times has already named her a key figure in the new wave of horror-inflected literature by Latin American women that takes on major social issues, a genre that has come to be known as narrativa de lo inusual (literature of the unusual).

El tormentoso e inspirador mundo interior de una mujer que luchó contra su tiempo.

París, 1931. Antonieta Rivas Mercado se quita la vida en la catedral de Notre Dame con la pistola de su amante, José Vasconcelos, mientras él la espera para desayunar. Había llegado a Francia con la esperanza de apartarse del torbellino de un México corrompido tras el fraude electoral de 1929, donde había sido pieza clave para la campaña presidencial de Vasconcelos que terminó aplastada por Plutarco Elías Calles. A la sombra del ángel nos sumerge en la fascinante vida de quien fuera la heredera de uno de los arquitectos más destacados del porfiriato, don Antonio Rivas Mercado: su romántica infancia rodeada por el arte; su intensa relación intelectual con Diego Rivera, Carlos Chávez y Xavier Villaurrutia, su importante rol como artista y mecenas de los Contemporáneos, su temprano matrimonio y trágicos amores.

Este clásico de Kathryn S. Blair captura el tormentoso e inspirador mundo interior de una mujer que luchó contra su tiempo.

The intense novel Dalia: Lost Youth follows a young girl's difficult journey through her childhood in Mexico. Hers is a story filled with pain and heartache.

Before Dalia was five years old, she had the responsibility of helping her mother serve her abusive father and three older brothers, and look after her two younger siblings.

When she was 12, a stranger kidnapped her and forced her to live with him and his family. Even though her real father is a cruel man, she misses him and her own family. But Dalia's father betrays her and trades her for a tract of land.

Says the author, I wanted to share Dalia's story, for those children who had ever been abused to let them know that they can survive, and never allow anyone to still their dreams and glory. They are not alone.

(About the Author)

Rosa Flores found it emotionally hard to write Dalia's story and feel what she went through. The author grew up in Mexico and now lives in Dawsonville, Georgia. In her early teens, she was blessed to immigrate to United States and became a citizen. She continued her formal education in California, became proficient in the English language, and has held executive positions in several U.S. companies. Now retired, she enjoys nature and hiking, especially walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail in Spain. This is her first book, and a sequel is in the works.

Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles.

This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first time, is an important work by one of Mexico's, and indeed Latin America's, major writers of the twentieth century. Juan García Ponce helped Mexican arts and letters break out of the ossified styles and themes of the post-Revolutionary Mexican School with works that explore the conflict between individual desire and the demands of family and work. Written at a turning point in his career, The House on the Beach foreshadows his embrace of the erotic encounter as a means of undermining rigid, socially constructed personal identity. It supports feminist views and probes deeply into the contradictions, backwardness, and progress of modern Mexican society.