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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Recovering from an unspecified accident, the narrator of Loop finds herself in waiting rooms of different kinds: airport departure lounges, doctors' surgeries, and above all at home, awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who has travelled to Spain following the death of his mother.
Loop is a love story told from the perspective of a contemporary Penelope who, instead of weaving and unravelling her shroud, writes and erases her thoughts in her 'ideal' notebook. At once, funny and thought-provoking, her thoughts range from her stationery preferences to the different scales on which life is lived, while a cast of unlikely characters cross the page, from Proust to a mysterious dwarf, from a dreamy cat to David Bowie singing "Wild is the Wind." Written in an assured, irreverent style, Loop is the journal of an absence, one in which the most minute or whimsical observations open up universes. Combining aphoristic fragments with introspective narrative, and evoking Italo Calvino and Fernando Pessoa in its playfulness and wry humour, this original reflection on relationships, solitude and the purpose of writing offers a glimpse of contemporary life in Mexico City, while asking what it really means to find our place in the world.
Winner of the PEN Translates Award (UK)
"With a light, playful touch, Lozano richly layers scenes and details, connecting ideas and weaving her story like Penelope at her loom. An intimate book that starts small and expands steadily outward, with a cumulative effect both moving and hopeful." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Lozano's playful prose and imagery propel the book forward, despite its loose shape and lack of plot. It adds up to a delightful meditation on waiting, love, and the inevitability of change." - Publishers Weekly
"A glorious tapestry of ideas." - The Guardian (UK)
"Clever, innovative...an erudite observation of the everyday." - Translating Women (UK)
This information about Loop was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in Mexico City in 1981, Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist and editor. She studied literature in Mexico and the United States. She edits the Chicago-based literary journal Make and is on the editorial board of Ugly Duckling Presse. In addition to Loop, she has published Todo o nada (All or Nothing, 2009), which is being adapted for the screen, and a book of short stories, Cómo piensan las piedras (How Stones Think, 2017). In 2015, she was recognised by the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the leading Mexican authors under 40 years of age, and she was selected by the Hay Festival in 2017 as one of the Bogotá39, a list of the most outstanding new authors from Latin America. Loop is her first book to appear in English.
Annie McDermott's published and forthcoming translations include Mario Levrero's Empty Words and The Luminous Novel (And Other Stories and Coffee House Press), Feebleminded by Ariana Harwicz (co-translation with Carolina Orloff, Charco Press) and City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão (co-translation with Jethro Soutar, Dalkey Archive Press). Her translations, reviews and essays have appeared in Granta, The White Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, the Times Literary Supplement and LitHub, among others. Annie also edits books for Charco Press, including Julián Fuks' Resistance and Giuseppe Caputo's An Orphan World.
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