Yuri Herrera

A streetwise heroine crosses from Mexico to USA to find her brother in this mythologizing novel by Juan Rulfo's heir.

Signs Preceding the End of the World

"The things people inscribe on tombstones, even if only with their breatherasing those things is what the Redeemer s there for.""

The Transmigration of Bodies

With language that mixes violence and poetry, this crime novel tells the life of Mexican mobsters and drug dealers and their relationship with the outside world in the midst of an epidemic. The action takes place over the course of a single day, in which a much-desired woman, Thrice Blonde, meets The Rescuer, a man who embodies all fears and contradictions and whose words seem to heal everything. Themes of tragedy, liberation, family, sex, and death intertwine with social elements distinct to life south of the border in this intense story. Con un lenguaje que mezcla la violencia y la poesía, esta novela negra narra la vida de los mafiosos y los narcos mexicanos y su relación con el mundo exterior en medio de una epidemia. La acción acontece durante una sola jornada, en la que una mujer deseada, La Tres Veces Rubia, se encuentra con El Alfaqueque, un hombre quien encarna todos los miedos y contradicciones y cuyas palabras parecen sanar todo. Los temas de la tragedia, la redención, la familia, el sexo y la muerte se entrelazan con elementos sociales distintos de la vida al sur de la frontera en esta historia intensa.

La transmigración de los cuerpos

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.

Three Novels

The Kingdom, the Sun and Death

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.

Stories

Ten Planets

Beats, daggers, girls, and graft: can the Artist sing truth to power where a Mexican drug baron holds court?

Kingdom Cons

Dünyanin Sonunu Önceleyen Isaretler

Yuri Herrera no escribe 'simplemente' sobre México y la frontera, sino que crea su México a través de historias y leyendas del pasado y del presente. Y traza con exactitud el mapa de un territorio que es aún más gigantesco, hecho tanto de lo que está sobre la tierra y en lo real como de lo que está bajo ella y pertenece a lo mitológico, a las culturas precolombinas. Quien recorre ese territorio a través de las nueve etapas de los mitos, es Makina, un personaje sin parangón en la literatura de tan real como parece, a pesar de vivir en un mundo que es quizá el inframundo.

Señales que precederán al fin del mundo

Lisa Dillman

Bedenlerin Göcü

Trabajos del reino

Deborah Levy

Ben Okri

Valeria Luiselli

Twelve contemporary stories inspired by Shakespeare and Cervantes, to mark the 400th anniversaries of their deaths. Introduced by Salman Rushdie.

Twelve Stories After Cervantes and Shakespeare

Lunatics, Lovers and Poets

Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages - one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

"Yuri Herrera destaca con su primer libro, Trabajos del reino, en el que, a través de la mirada de un compositor de corridos, despliega ante el lector un panorama de la 'vida palaciega' de un cártel del narcotráfico. Lobo, protagonista y narrador de la novela, es un ser marginado desde su nacimiento. No posee educación, pero le sobra el talento para convertir en cantos épicos los sucesos notables, por eso es el Artista. Una tarde se topa con el hombre que habrá de transformar su vida... Así, reconstruyendo el mundo interior del cártel con un lenguaje popular no exento de lirismo, muestra de su excelente oído, y con un tono que algunas veces adquiere registros de fábula infantil y otras de tragedia del Renacimiento, las palabras del Artista nos internan en un castillo donde parece reinar la felicidad, pero cunden las intrigas soterradas."--Publisher's description.

Mine fire industrial disaster nonfiction: from the author of Signs Preceding The End of The World

The El Bordo Mine Fire

A Silent Fury

New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Ju rez 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, Ju rez 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 Ju rez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Ju rez'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.

Season of the Swamp

El incendio de la mina El Bordo (Largo recorrido) (Spanish Edition)

 Este libro inventa una hipótesis: ¿qué sucedió durante el año y medio en que Benito Juárez, quien acabaría siendo el primer presidente indígena de México, vivió desterrado en Nueva Orleans? Es en ese «hueco marcado por el punto y aparte» en la autobiografía de Juárez donde comienza la narración. Acompañado por un pequeño grupo de exiliados políticos, Juárez desembarca en 1853 en esa ciudad hedionda que, situada a orillas de un pantano, los absorbe como una esponja. En ella se rinden al lodo, a las flores de jazmín, a la música, a la extrañeza del idioma y al insoportable verano, pero, sobre todo, se dan de bruces con la descarnada realidad del comercio de seres humanos, un mercado que nunca se detiene. Descubrirán que Nueva Orleans es una colmena de identidades heterogéneas donde se venden mujeres apresadas por las calles y donde el capitalismo muestra su pulsión primitiva, la más esperpéntica.

La estación del pantano muestra ese tiempo detenido e incierto que precede siempre a la acción de unos cuantos audaces para tratar de invertir el orden establecido. Y lo hace con la libertad arrolladora y la transgresión que caracterizan la escritura de Herrera, gracias a la cual consigue que nuestra lengua suene como una lengua liberada del diccionario que decide salir a dar un paseo. Yuri Herrera bucea esta vez en la Historia para ofrecernos una novela magistral que, con una gran potencia fabuladora al tiempo que firmemente asentada en la investigación archivística, logra dar con una clave secreta de un presente a la intemperie.

La estación del pantano

Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages -- one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

(book Discussion Kit)

Een jonge Mexicaanse vrouw probeert naar de Verenigde Staten te emigreren.

Yuri Herrera

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