Francisco Goldman

Say Her Name

Celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married a beautiful young writer named Aura Estrada in a romantic Mexican hacienda in the summer 2005. The month before their second anniversary, during a long-awaited holiday, Aura broke her neck while body surfing. Francisco, blamed for Aura's death by her family and blaming himself, wanted to die, too. But instead he wrote Say Her Name, a novel chronicling his great love and unspeakable loss, tracking the stages of grief when pure love gives way to bottomless pain. Suddenly a widower, Goldman collects everything he can about his wife, hungry to keep Aura alive with every memory. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City with her fiercely devoted mother to her studies at Columbia University, through their newlywed years in New York City and travels to Mexico and Europe-and always through the prism of her gifted writings-Goldman seeks her essence and grieves her loss. Humor leavens the pain as he lives through the madness of utter grief and creates a living portrait of a love as joyous and playful as it is deep and profound. Say Her Name is a love story, a bold inquiry into destiny and accountability, and a tribute to Aura-who she was and who she would have been.

Who Killed the Bishop?

The Art of Political Murder

Rafael Bernal

Days before a visit to Mexico City by the American President, Filiberto Garcâia is assigned to investigate a Chinese-Mongolian assassination plot, leading him into the underbelly of the city's Chinatown and a deepening conspiracy.

The Mongolian Conspiracy

The Long Night of White Chickens

"Full of rebellious comedy and vitality. . . Goldman’s autobiographical immersion answers the urgent cry of memory. . . [He] is a natural storyteller―funny, intimate, sarcastic, all-noticing.” ―James Wood, New Yorker In Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman’s “brilliantly constructed auto-fiction” (NPR), we meet Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer grappling with the challenges of family and love, legacies of violence and war, and growing up as the son of immigrants—a Guatemalan Catholic mother and a Russian Jewish father—in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb. Told in an irresistibly funny, tender and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of family explores the pressures of living between worlds. “A family portrait that is funny, loving and fierce, all at the same time.”—NPR

Monkey Boy

The Interior Circuit is Goldman's story of his emergence from grief five years after his wife's death, symbolized by his attempt to overcome his fear of driving in the city. Embracing the DF (Mexico City) as his home, Goldman explores and celebrates the city which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. This is the chronicle of an awakening, both personal and political, 'interior' and 'exterior', to the meaning and responsibilities of home. Mexico's narcotics war rages on and, with the restoration of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) to power in the 2012 elections, the DF's special apartness seems threatened. In the summer of 2013, when Mexican organized-crime violence and deaths erupt in the city in an unprecedented way, Goldman sets out to try to understand the menacing challenges the city now faces. By turns exuberant, poetic, reportorial, philosophic, and urgent, The Interior Circuit fuses a personal journey to an account of one of the world's most remarkable and often misunderstood cities.

A Mexico City Chronicle

The Interior Circuit

America seen through the eyes of the huddled masses. The hero is Estaban, one of a group of Central Americans brought to New York to crew a tramp ship, only to be abandoned by the ship's owners. When their food runs out Estaban, a former Nicaraguan guerrilla, goes ashore to steal for them. His forays lead him to a Latino neighborhood where he finds work and love. By the author of The Long Night of the White Chickens.

The ordinary seaman

By the author of The Long Night of the White Chickens: A novel of the perils, passions, and misadventures of a young Nicaraguan sailor trapped in Brooklyn. Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsday, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Publishers Weekly At nineteen, Esteban Gaitan is already a veteran of war. A Sandinista soldier and an avowed communist, Esteban leaves Nicaragua to begin a new life in America. It’s the late 1980s when he, along with fourteen other men, arrive to form the crew of the Urus, a ship docked on a desolate Brooklyn pier. Elias and Mark, the owners of the Urus, hold the men captive, forcing them to work in a vain attempt to make the rotting vessel seaworthy. Without the means to return home, Esteban remains a virtual prisoner, haunted by the loss of the woman he loved during the war. Eventually, he sneaks off the ship, making nocturnal forays into Brooklyn, where he meets Joaquina, a Mexican immigrant who works as a manicurist, and begins to plot his permanent escape. Centering his novel around Esteban, but also telling the stories of his fellow landlocked sailors, Francisco Goldman proves once again that he is “a major talent of great style and soul” (The Miami Herald). “Often very funny . . . Here, a corner of Brooklyn becomes the exotic and foreign experience, and through Esteban’s eyes it is as mysterious and alluring as Tangiers.” —The Dallas Morning News

The Ordinary Seaman

Francisco Goldberg has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to New York City in hopes of 'going home again.' It's been five years since the end of his last relationship and he is falling in love again. Soon he is beckoned back to Boston by the high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations, and his mother, Yolanda, around whom his story orbits like a dark star. Backdropping this five-day trip to his childhood home is the spectre of Frank's recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine, volcanically tempered, pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing; as well as the high school bullies who gave him the moniker 'monkey boy' and his estranged sister, Lexi. Told in an open, irresistibly funny and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of growing up outside the dominant culture unearths the hidden cruelties in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb where Francisco - aka Paco, aka Frankie Gee - came of age. A crowning achievement from one of the most important American voices of the last 40 years.

Details the story of a remarkable group of engaging, courageous young people known as Los Intocables and their fight for justice in an in-depth account of the murder of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi, the country's leading human rights activist, as well as the killing or forced exiles of multiple witnesses, prosecutors, and judges. 50,000 first printing.

Eduardo Galeano

Susanne Jonas

Ricardo Falla

For the past ten years Jonathan Moller has photographed communities uprooted by war in Guatemala. The result is this collection of portraits taken during that decade, revealing stories of life and death, hope and despair and of struggles for survival, respect and truth. Featuring 147 tritone portraits, Our Culture is Our Resistance also includes a preface by Guatemalan Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu and other testimonies and reflections by Guatemalan community members and survivors.

Repression, Refuge, and Healing in Guatemala

Our Culture is Our Resistance

A novel of enormous achievement, Monkey Boy tells the tale of Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer who grapples with his heritage, career, and growing up Guatemalan and Jewish in America.

A Novel

Winner of the T. R. Fyvel Book Award 2008 (Index on Censorship Awards) Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing 2009 On a Sunday night in 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala's leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death. Two days earlier, a Church-sponsored report had implicated Guatemala's government in the disappearances of 200,000 civilians. The Church, feeling that it could not rely on the legal system, took the controversial decision to assemble a team of men, Los Intocables (The Untouchables), to take down Gerardi's killers. In a gripping reconstruction, worthy of Graham Greene, Francisco Goldman traces Los Intocables struggle with the Guatemalan authorities to reveal the true story, uncovering the involvement of youth gangs, political corruption and organised crime. Most of all, he tells the story of an extraordinary group of courageous people and their fight for justice.

Who Killed Bishop Gerardi?

Art of Political Murder

El 26 de abril de 1998, el obispo y coordinador de la Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, Juan Gerardi, fue asesinado a golpes. Sólo habían pasado dos días desde que presentara las mil seiscientas páginas del informe que documentaba las sistemáticas violaciones de los derechos humanos cometidas por el ejército de Guatemala en la lucha contra la insurgencia que, formalmente, había terminado en 1996. «El horror con nombre y apellidos», llamaría la prensa local al documento, aludiendo a las más de cincuenta mil víctimas de la guerra civil que identificaba. Las hipótesis de los investigadores del gobierno, en una investigación que más parecía una farsa, iban desde el crimen pasional entre homosexuales, a una red de traficantes de arte sacro, cuyos robos había descubierto Gerardi. Pero los héroes de este libro son los jóvenes investigadores de la Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado que investigaron por su cuenta el asesinato. Su trabajo de detectives condujo a un juicio histórico, y a condenas mucho más convincentes. «Goldman no sólo ejerce de escritor, y magnífico, sino que también es un detective ético y veraz» (Jon Lee Anderson). Premio Censorship’s Freedom of Expression.

¿Quién mató al obispo?

El arte del asesinato político

The author of Say Her Name shares a deeply personal memoir of grieving the loss of his wife—and confronting the troubled city where she grew up. Five years after his wife’s untimely death, Francisco Goldman decided to overcome his fear of driving in Mexico City. The widower and award-winning writer wanted to symbolize his love and enduring grief by fully embracing his late wife’s childhood home and the city that came to mean so much to them. The Interior Circuit is Goldman’s chronicle of his personal and political awakening to the nuances of this unique city as he learns to navigate the “circuito interior,” a network of highway-like roads that crisscross the traffic-plagued city. Many regard Mexico’s capital—then known as the “DF” or Distrito Federal—as a haven from the many social ills and violence that wracks the rest of the country. Goldman’s account reveals the more complicated truth. As Mexico’s narco war raged on and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) returned to power in the summer 2012 elections, the DF’s special apartness came under threat. When organized crime–related violence and death erupt in the summer of 2013, Goldman sets out to try to understand the new challenges facing the city. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part political reportage, The Interior Circuit “is so sneakily brilliant it’s hard to put into words. . . . It is also, in the finest sense, a book that creates its own form” (Los Angeles Times).

Der Literaturwissenschaftler und Romancier erzählt von dem tödlichen Badeunfall seiner jungen und lebenshungrigen Frau und davon, wie er mit fast unerträglichen Verlust- und Schuldgefühlen umgeht.

Sag ihren Namen

A devout woman finds herself adrift in late 19th century Central America in this novel of “deep imagination, stylistic verve, and psychological acuity” (The Washington Post). Set in late nineteenth century Central America and New York City, The Divine Husband tells the story of María de las Nieves Moran, whose brief career as a nun is ended in the wake of revolution. Forced to make her way in the secular world, María is surrounded by an unforgettable cast of characters: José Martí, the poet and hero of Cuban independence and the first man María loves; Mack Chinchilla, the Yankee-Indio entrepreneur intent on winning her hand; a British diplomat setting up a political impostor plot; and Mathilde, the daughter whose birth—perhaps fathered by one of these men—ruins María’s reputation and launches her on a journey toward a new future. This joyfully imagined novel of ideas is populated by Indian girls, wandering Jewish coffee farmers, the founder of the rubber-balloon industry, and one of Latin America’s greatest and most complex men. The Divine Husband is a sweeping, poetic novel rich in historical detail and vivid characterization. “Goldman echoes Flaubert, García Marquez, and even DeLillo.”—Bookforum

Francisco Goldman

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