Yxta Maya Murray

The gripping, thought-provoking stories in Yxta Maya Murray’s latest collection find their inspiration in the headlines. Here, ordinary people negotiate tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. A nurse volunteers to serve in catastrophe-stricken Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and discovers that her skill and compassion are useless in the face of stubborn governmental inertia. An Environmental Protection Agency employee, whose agricultural-worker parents died after long exposure to a deadly pesticide, finds herself forced to find justifications for reversing regulations that had earlier banned the chemical. A Department of Education employee in a dystopic future America visits a highly praised charter school and discovers the horrific consequences of academic failure. A transgender trainer of beauty pageant contestants takes on a beautiful Latina for the Miss USA pageant and brings her to perfection and the brink of victory, only to discover that she has a fatal secret. The characters in these stories grapple with the consequences of frightening attitudes and policies pervasive in the United States today. The stories explore not only our distressing human capacity for moral numbness in the face of evil, but also reveal our surprising stores of compassion and forgiveness. These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written stories are troubling yet irresistible mirrors of our time.

Stories

The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

On September 27, 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings concerning Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's allegations that then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the mid-1980s. Advice and Consent is a play formed of interviews, found text, and transcripts, re-arranged, selected, and edited for poetic and provocative effect. The drama is designed as a thought experiment about power, pathos, tragedy, politics, gender, race, and truth. Accompanied by a score written by law professor and violinist Kathleen Kim, it may be either read or performed.

A Play in One Act

Advice and Consent

Fictionally explores the coming-of-age of two teenaged girls from East L.A. as they struggle to define themselves in a world of brutal gang warfare

A Novel

Locas

We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action "artivism" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change. Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists —Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown—and the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.

Art, Activism, and the Law

We Make Each Other Beautiful

There is a legend of the New World that has endured for centuries: the strange, tragic tale of a King, a Witch . . . and a blue gem of intoxicating beauty said to grant extraordinary power to whoever possesses it. Archaeologist Juana Sanchez, convinced that she's discovered the key to unlocking the mystery of the fabled Queen Jade, ventures into the Central American jungle alone—just ahead of the relentless pounding fury of Hurricane Mitch. When the terrible storm is over, Juana is gone, and an ancient, long-buried jade mine has been uncovered in the mountains of Guatemala, giving new hope to all obsessed seekers of the legendary stone. But it is a different obsession that plunges Juana's daughter—scholar and bookseller Lola Sanchez—into the remarkable adventure of a lifetime. For only by following the Queen Jade's perilous, cursed trail can Lola hope to find her vanished mother . . . if it isn't already too late.

A New World Novel of Adventure

The Queen Jade

A novel of life on the L.A. streets for a Mexican-American streetfighter turned star female boxer follows the rough-and-tumble career of Rita Zapata, who uses her fists to get what she wants but still hopes to find a love that will last. Reprint.

What It Takes to Get to Vegas

Fifteen-year-old Michelle Peäna, born into a powerful Mexican American gang family, tries to reconcile her gangster legacy with the girl she has become--a nationally ranked runner and academic superstar.

The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Kidnapped

In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xochitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda’s grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she’s going to film a groundbreaking autocritical documentary in Mexico. But then everything starts to fall apart when Xochitl’s biological clock begins beeping, Amanda’s father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodes just as she has a breakthrough.

Art Is Everything

Kiki and Mish are best friends, but what Kiki doesn?t know is that Michelle Pena was born a gang princess. ?Princess P? grew up destined to inherit leadership of the Snakes: a future filled with crime and fear. Michelle, on the other hand, is a nationally ranked athlete and academic superstar. This is her new life, and she?s finally put her past?and her childhood love for Silver?to rest. Then Silver helps kidnap both girls, and Michelle has to figure out how to free them both?and reconnect with a future that might now be beyond her reach.

Yxta Maya Murray

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