Cristina Rivera Garza

On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator’s house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host’s gender and identity. The increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity and eventually finds himself in a sanatorium. A Gothic tale of destabilized male-female binaries and subverted literary tropes, this is the book's first English publication.

The Iliac Crest

"The contemporary Latin American detective novel is a form that uses the individual's rollicking quest as a means of resistance against repressive structures and the violences they engender. Cristina Rivera Garza's The Taiga Syndrome, in this stellar translation by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, gives English-language readers a lyrically luminous take on the genre while not skimping on its adventurous antics. If The Taiga Syndrome is a book of illness, it's also about exile, disappearance, borders, love, language and translation, desire, capitalism and its discontents, fairy tales, and what it means to be possessed by the madness of others and the madness of ourselves. The murmurs that haunt the detective in The Taiga Syndrome evoke the history of Mexican fiction, most notably Juan Rulfo. But this is not a religious state of purgatory. It's more like Apocalypse Now fused with the worlds of Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges. In other words, there is no one writing novels as phantasmagorically exquisite as Cristina Rivera Garza's. The Taiga Syndrome, which is both quietly poetic and narratively unhinged, is a crucial addition to her distinguished oeuvre." - Daniel Borzutzky, author of the National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human

The Taiga Syndrome

El invencible verano de Liliana

This philosophical investigation into state violence and mourning in twenty-first-century Mexico weaves together personal essay and literary theory, giving voice to the political experience of collective pain.

Texts from a Wounded Country

Grieving

Una inclemente noche de tormenta, alguien llama a la puerta de una casa enclavada en un agreste y solitario lugar frente al océano. Su dueño, un médico dedicado a paliar el dolor de los enfermos terminales y que trabaja en un mortecino hospital denominado Granja del Buen Descanso, abre la puerta sin sospechar que, cuando deje entrar a aquella joven desconocida que aguarda en el umbral, su vida va a transformarse de modo irreversible. La joven, que dice llamarse Amparo Dávila, se instala en la casa con la autoridad de los fantasmas. Además, poco después hace su aparición una segunda mujer, una antigua amante del protagonista, a la que éste abandonó tiempo atrás. Qué extraños vínculos unen a ambas mujeres?, pero, sobre todo, qué episodio del pasado atormenta al médico, cada vez más aislado de la realidad que le rodea?

La cresta de Ilión

Nadie me verá llorar

Tayga Sendromu

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • “A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem). “Cristina Rivera Garza wanted to shed light on the life of her sister, killed 30 years ago. . . . The record of a woman who, against the odds, refuses to be forgotten.”—The New York Times A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of that quest . In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister’s history, depicting everything from Liliana’s early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before. Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence—handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones—to document her sister’s life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today.

A Sister's Search for Justice

Liliana's Invincible Summer

From one of Mexico's greatest contemporary writers, an astonishing work of non-fiction that illuminates an epidemic of femicide in Mexico through the death of one woman.'Meticulously written and deeply moving . . . A triumph' JACKIE KAY'Full of tenderness and beauty. This book is a revelation and a restoration of her sister's memory' MARIANA ENRIQUEZ, author of The Dangers of Smoking in BedOn the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza's sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide.She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master's degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him.Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence - handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints - to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister's voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.

A labyrinthine excavation of forgotten Mexican women writers, this Gothic novel illustrates how gendered language can wield destructive power.

Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture

The Milk of Almonds

Joaquin Buitrago, a photographer in the Castaneda Insane Asylum, believes a patient is a prostitute he knew years earlier. His obsession in confirming Matilde's identity leads him to explore the clinics records, and her tragic history. He discovers that she was a peasant adopted by a doctor uncle. She led a calm life until Castulo, a young revolutionary chased by the authorities, finds shelter in her home. Matilde's eyes are opened to the social upheaval will lead her to break with her uncle and hide out with Diamantina Vicari. Diamantina's death devastates Matilde so much that she wanders about, completely lost, doing all kinds of jobs, including prostitution. As the photographer discovers more details, he becomes convinced that he and Matilde should live together. Ultimately, as they face defeat in a repressive society, they search to establish in the rubble an uncertain future that will somehow restore their freedom.

A Novel

No One Will See Me Cry

Untitled Rivera Garza

narrativas dolientes desde el Manicomio General, México, 1910-1930

La Castañeda

LA Cresta De Ilion/Ilion's Crest

Este libro es para celebrar el paso de Liliana Rivera Garza por la tierra y para decirle que, claro que sí, lo vamos a tirar. Al patriarcado lo vamos a tirar. «El 16 de julio de 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, mi hermana, fue víctima de un feminicidio. Era una muchacha de 20 años, estudiante de arquitectura. Tenía años tratando de terminar su relación con un novio de la preparatoria que insistía en no dejarla ir. Unas cuantas semanas antes de la tragedia, Liliana por fin tomó una decisión definitiva: en lo más crudo del invierto había descubierto que en ella, como bien lo había dicho Albert Camus, había un invencible verano. Lo dejaría atrás. Empezaría una nueva vida. Haría una maestría y después un doctorado; viajaría a Londres. «La decisión de él fue que ella no tendría una vida sin él. Hace apenas un año decidí abrir las cajas donde depositamos las pertenencias de mi hermana. Su voz atravesó el tiempo y, como la de tantas mujeres desaparecidas y ultrajadas en México, demandó justicia. «El invencible verano de Liliana es una excavación en la vida de una mujer brillante y audaz que careció, como nosotros mismos, como todos los demás, del lenguaje necesario para identificar, denunciar y luchar contra la violencia sexista y el terrorismo de pareja que caracteriza a tantas relaciones patriarcales.»

El invencible verano de Liliana / Liliana's Invincible Summer

necroescrituras y desapropiación

Los muertos indóciles

El mal de la taiga

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. La marea de recuerdos, de la que va surgiendo la turbulenta existencia de Matilda, provoca también en el fotógrafo una reflexión sobre su propia vida y sobre los motivos de su dependencia de los narcóticos. Y tal vez atisben los dos un porvenir que los redima de la derrota moral y psíquica en la que ambos se encuentran. Sea como sea, el viaje al pasado habrá valido la pena.

Una mujer descubre accidentalmente el cadáver castrado de un joven. El cuerpo yace al fondo de un callejón, junto a unos enigmáticos versos de la poeta argentina Alejandra Pizarnik. Cuando la mujer —que se hace llamar Cristina Rivera Garza y ha leído la obra poética de Pizarnik— notifica su hallazgo a la policía, se convierte, de manera automática, en la misteriosa Informante. ¿Qué ha visto? ¿Qué cree que significan esos versos, que comienzan así: «Cuídate de mí amor mío»? La aparición de nuevas víctimas, siempre hombres castrados, da pie a la policía para pensar que se enfrenta a un asesino en serie, y dos mujeres se empeñan en dar con él. Una es la infatigable detective del Departamento de Investigación de Homicidios, a la que, con su ayudante Valerio, han encomendado el caso. La otra mujer es una misteriosa periodista especializada en sucesos. Ambas se empeñan en resolver un caso que depara, como toda la historia, más sorpresas que respuestas. Ya desde el título, perteneciente a un verso de la poeta suicida Alejandra Pizarnik, la autora se sirve de los más diversos géneros literarios para abordar, con un lenguaje narrativo desgarrado y osado, donde nada es inocente, cuestiones como la violencia y la fragmentación de la realidad en el mundo contemporáneo.

Cristina Rivera Garza

About

Books

Join the club