★ 02/07/2022
This hypnotic, riveting collection of new and previously published stories from MacArthur Fellow Rivera Garza (Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, essays) takes on love, migration, and violence. The narrators of “Unknowing” and “The Day Juan Rulfo Died” wrestle with the fallout of short-lived relationships in Mexico City, a place imagined by Rivera Garza as a sprawling, often hostile metropolis. The dangers implicit in desire inform the murder investigations dramatized in “The Last Sign” and the stand-out “Simple Pleasure. Pure Pleasure.” Migration defines the life of the protagonist in “Nostalgia,” who lives more in the world of his dreams than in his waking life; as well as the woman of “Offside,” who makes a new life in a snowy town in an unnamed foreign country where she is stranded, only to find that her children with a local man are becoming strangers to her. A chronology of anthropology figures into “Autoethnography with the Other” (“1970–1980.... Mea culpa: anthropologists question their complicity with colonial processes”), a story of a mysterious stranger whose affair with the narrator endangers them both. The author successfully deploys a range of styles and forms, influenced by prose poetry, fables, and postmodern experiments. Throughout, she documents the ravages of the real world while establishing a refuge in literature: “I immediately calmed down when I repeated ‘nothing is real,’ ” narrates the protagonist of “The Survivor from Pripyat.” These unsettling yet deeply approachable stories ought to earn Rivera Garza the wider attention she deserves. (Apr.)
"The primary tension in Rivera Garza’s fiction—between the unruly intensities of sexual desire and the political disciplining of the body—is at its most concentrated in the latest translation of her work, New and Selected Stories (Dorothy) . . .The conceptual cunning of Rivera Garza’s stories cannot account for the passion that warms them."—Merve Emre, The New Yorker
“The stories in this collection are as varied as Rivera Garza’s remarkable career, and this book is an excellent introduction to a unique writer who deserves to be recognized not just in Mexico, but all over the world.” —Kirkus, starred review
“Once you get used to the New and Selected Stories’ eerie strangeness, it’s hard to pick a favorite, or convince yourself to set the book down.” —Lily Meyer, NPR.com
“English-language readers finally have the chance to enter into the beguiling, menacing, and strangely poignant world that one of Mexico’s best writers creates through her short stories. . . . The consistently high quality of all the translations makes apparent not only the changes in Rivera Garza’s themes and style but also the way that the stories share an urgent search for meaning and connection.” —Ryan Long, World Literature Today
“Whenever I read Joy Williams, I find myself sinking into this strange, boggy, liminal world, where everything feels sharp and barbed and just so slightly off-kilter. It’s a bit how I imagine being hypnotized would feel, and I had a similar sensation reading the new collection from Cristina Rivera Garza (put out by Dorothy Project, arguably one of the coolest publishers out there). . . If you like this collection, check out Rivera Garza’s novel, The Taiga Syndrome, also out from Dorothy. So odd; so good.” —Kelsey Ford, Powell’s.com
“This hypnotic, riveting collection of new and previously published stories from MacArthur Fellow Rivera Garza takes on love, migration, and violence. . . . These unsettling yet deeply approachable stories ought to earn Rivera Garza the wider attention she deserves.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“More writing from Cristina Rivera Garza is always a great gift. In this collection, New and Selected Stories, readers are able to track Rivera Garza’s writing over time, and realize that she has since the beginning been working in a lane entirely her own. Her concerns remain the same—she writes of gender, borders, immigration, loneliness, and identity in the most crystalline prose, translated here by the author herself, Sarah Booker, and others. It . . . will serve as the perfect introduction to her work for new readers, and an equally satisfying addition to her catalogue for existing fans. I devoured this book and can hardly wait to read more.” —Meghana Kandlur, Seminary Co-op Bookstore
“Cristina Rivera Garza’s New and Selected Stories offers English-language readers access to more than 30 years of intriguing writing by one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary authors.” —Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
★ 2022-01-12
Tales from the most surreal of shadowlands.
In novels like The Iliac Crest (2017) and The Taiga Syndrome (2018), Mexican author Rivera Garza has displayed an affinity for the mysterious: randomly encountered shadowy strangers and odd settings simultaneously out of place and out of time. This new collection of short fiction, which contains stories dating back to the 1980s along with some new ones, thankfully finds the author on familiar ground; it proves that nobody does quiet menace quite like her. In “City of Men,” a reporter finds herself in the titular metropolis, having been assigned by her editor to write a story about the city from a woman’s perspective—it’s “a place she had never wanted to go,” and as the story progresses, the reader finds out why. It’s a creepy tale that’s filled with a growing unease, and Rivera Garza handles its slow-burn narrative beautifully. A similar chilling surrealism pervades “The Date,” about an investigator on the trail of…well, something; it’s not quite clear. But it doesn’t need to be: Rivera Garza packs an impressive amount of atmospheric unease into its four pages, and the vagueness of the subject makes it even scarier. More conventional, but just as excellent, is “The Day Juan Rulfo Died,” which tells the story of a cafe meeting between two ex-partners who have “started to see each other just to criticize our current lovers.” The narrator, the reader comes to realize, isn’t as fine with their breakup as he initially lets on, admitting, “I wanted to own the world, the whole world, just to have the opportunity to wrap it up in wrapping paper and place it in her lap.” The story ends with a stunning final sentence that perfectly captures the post-romantic hopelessness and heartbreak that sometimes feel like they will never go away. The stories in this collection are as varied as Rivera Garza’s remarkable career, and this book is an excellent introduction to a unique writer who deserves to be recognized not just in Mexico, but all over the world.
A fine collection, chilling and frequently bizarre in all the best ways.
Offers English-language readers access to more than thirty years of intriguing writing by one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary authors.”
This audiobook collection of stories by the critically acclaimed Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza is experimental in nature, with some enigmatic works straddling the line between reality and surreality. The 23 stories, written over the course of more than 30 years, have themes ranging from love to immigration to the search for meaning. An ensemble of seven talented narrators divides up the reading to varying effect. In the more nonlinear works, such as the two Pripyat stories, the narrators have tried to inject some additional drama with the effect coming off as overdone, distracting, and even gravelly. The stories with a more traditional structure are handled capably by the narrators, with appropriate tone and cadence. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
