Yuri Herrera

A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the WorldNew 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.

New Orleans, 1853. A young Zapotec man named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp along with a small group of fellow political exiles from Mexico. Later, in 1858, he is to become the first indigenous Mexican president, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city. He falls in love with the music and food, but unavoidable, too, is the trade in human beings. A magnificent work of speculative history and a love letter to New Orleans.‘One of the most original and prodigiously gifted writers at work today.‘ Katie Kitamura

This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West is the second entry in the Divide anthology series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West. In this collection legends, myths, tales, omens, folk horror, and science fiction explore the fantastical, the apocalyptic, the bizarre, the unknown, and the apocryphal origins and conclusions of life on the occidental side of the Continental Divide. In this collection, after the ‘what is’ comes the ‘what will be’, as acclaimed authors and emerging voices weave tales that push the boundaries of imagination: Ken Liu takes us to the frontiers of America and China in a stark tale of perseverance; Kate Bernheimer immerses us in the fairytale lands of modern celebrity; Benjamin Percy takes us hunting for deer and connection in eastern Oregon; Yuri Herrera grants us insight on our future overlords; Tessa Fontaine places us in-between with a monster and a question; Dominique Dickey chases familiar ghosts; and Willy Vlautin takes us on the wild ride that is a winning streak. Accompanied by a foreword from This Side of the Divide alum, and author of The Forbidden City, Vanessa Hua, these twenty-five pieces of new lore excavate the beauty, the uncertainty, the longing, the bitter interactions and stark truths; the strong people and vivid places that have shaped, and will continue to shape the West until the end of days.

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.

Fanciful, philosophical science fictions by the writer of Signs Preceding the End of the World, one of The Guardian's '100 Best Books of the 21st Century'.

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.

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compa a de Santa Gertrudis--the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company--may have committed murder. The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that "no more than ten" men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors. A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers' tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compania de Santa Gertrudis - the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company - may have committed murder. The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that "no more than ten" men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors. A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers' tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

Six short stories by Mexican authors: Alberto Chimal, Erika Mergruen, Yuri Herrera, Isa Moreno, rsula Fuentesberain and Lorea Canales. "Originality and the joy of writing abound in these stories, fea-tures that define each of these writers. Also present is violence, the thread that runs through each of these stories and serves as the watchword around which my friend Omar Villasana -the editor of this edition- has brought together each of these authors... This anthology will also be published as an e-book, a term to which I am still not accustomed but one that fills me with joy, knowing that it will circulate from web to web and that thousands of Internet users will be able to enjoy beyond the confines of physical borders, something so necessary in modern times when there are those who strive to build walls and close doors." Elena Poniatowska Amor

In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part noir romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

Mexicos mest interessante forfatter akkurat nå. To kriminelle familier i kamp mot hverandre trenger en konfliktløser. Midt i en redselsfull epidemi som legger byens gater øde, holder familiene hverandres tenåringsbarn fanget. Meglerens instinkter og de tomme gatene forteller ham at det er best å holde seg innendørs, men han drar ut i byens underverden for å sørge for en utveksling av fangene. Dette er en roman som adresserer volden i nåtidens Mexico, med klangbunn fra Romeo og Julie, Roberto Bolaño og Raymond Chandler.

A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city's underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage. Yuri Herrera's novel is a response to the violence of contemporary Mexico. With echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolano and Raymond Chandler, The Transmigration of Bodies is a noirish tragedy and a tribute to those bodies - loved, sanctified, lusted after, and defiled - that violent crime has touched.

Makina er en ung kvinne med sterk karakter som får i oppgave av moren å finne den for lenge siden emigrerte broren og gi ham en beskjed. Makina legger ut på en reise som går gjennom Mexico og ulovlig inn i USA. Reisen strekker seg over ni etapper og prøvelser og spiller på parallellen til Aztekisk mytologi: For å komme til det underjordiske må de døde gjennom ni nivåer og utfordringer. Gjennom Makinas reise får vi et innblikk i en verden av bakmenn, smuglere, prostituerte, innvandrere og grensepoliti, men også i Makinas eget liv som mellommenneskelig tolk.

Maailmanlopun merkit on yksi kiinnostavimmista 2000-luvulla julkaistuista espanjankielisistä romaaneista. Romaani kasvaa realistisista mytologisiin mittoihin. Kirja on on vetävä ja viihdyttävä kertomus Meksikon ja Yhdysvaltain välisestä rajaseudusta ja alueen laittomuuksista vähän samaan tyyliin kuin Roberto Bolañon 2666 tai Cormac McCarthyn teokset. Makina, vanhassa hopeakaivostaajamassa tarinaan astuva nuori nainen, on oppinut selviytymään väkivaltaisessa machokulttuurissa. Hän ylittää Rio Granden kuin Styxin virran ja vaeltaa autiomaassa. Hän jättää elämänsä Meksikossa etsiäkseen Yhdysvaltoihin kadonnutta veljeään. Hänellä on mukanaan kaksi salaista lähetystä; yksi äidiltä veljelle, ja toinen alamaailmalta alamaailmalle. Ihmisten mielessä ja kielessä tapahtuu järisyttäviä muutoksia heidän ylitettyään rajan, varsinkin kun paluuta ei enää ole. Makina itsekään ei ole immuuni identiteetin muutokselle, vaikka hänessä on myyttisen sankarin piirteitä. Kirjan teemat sopivat hämmästyttävän hyvin Euroopankin nykytilanteeseen. Meksikolaissyntyinen Yuri Herrera (s. 1970) on Berkeleyssä, Kaliforniassa väitellyt kirjallisuuden tohtori, joka asuu New Orleansissa, Louisianassa. Kirjan suomentaja Einari Aaltonen on suomentanut myös Herreran debyyttiromaanin Kartellin trubaduuri (Sammakko, 2015). Aaltonen on tunnettu mm. ansiokkaista Roberto Bolaño- ja Arthur Rimbaud -suomennoksistaan.

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.

Kiertävä kapakkalaulaja pääsee todistamaan läheltä huumekartellin arkea. Tarinamaisissa corrido-balladeissaan hän laulaa ylistystä Kuninkaalle, mahtavalle huumeparonille. Corridojensa aiheet hän ammentaa ympärillään kuohuvasta todellisuudesta. Mutta mitkä ovat laulujen lunnaat ja mitä löytyy todellisuuden ytimestä? Millaista on elämä, arki ja juhla tämän päivän Meksikossa? Yuri Herrera (s. 1970) on yksi kiinnostavimmista meksikolaisista nykykirjailijoista. Kartellin trubaduuri on hänen esikoisromaaninsa.