Book Summary and Reviews of New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza

New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza

New and Selected Stories

by Cristina Rivera Garza

  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • Published:
  • Apr 2022, 280 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A story collection drawn from across her career brings into English for the first time the extraordinary stylistic and thematic range of the Mexican writer and MacArthur "genius" Cristina Rivera Garza.

"One of Mexico's greatest living writers," wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018 about Cristina Rivera Garza, "we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer." In the years since, Rivera Garza's work has received widespread recognition: She was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction that "interrogates culturally constructed notions of language, memory, and gender from a transnational perspective," and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

New and Selected Stories now brings together in English translation stories from across Rivera Garza's career, drawing from three collections spanning over 30 years and including new writing not yet published in Spanish. It is a unique and remarkable body of work, and a window into the ever-evolving stylistic and thematic development of one of the boldest, most original and affecting writers in the world today.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"This hypnotic, riveting collection of new and previously published stories from MacArthur Fellow Rivera Garza takes on love, migration, and violence...The author successfully deploys a range of styles and forms, influenced by prose poetry, fables, and postmodern experiments...These unsettling yet deeply approachable stories ought to earn Rivera Garza the wider attention she deserves." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Cristina Rivera Garza, one of Mexico's most important contemporary authors, is progressively gaining renown in the U.S. (where she's lived since 1989) and has won a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2020 National Book Critics Circle finalist nod in Criticism. Indie press Dorothy's release of New and Selected Stories, which gathers 30-plus years of intriguing work, ensures English-speaking readers enhanced access to Rivera Garza." - Shelf Awareness

This information about New and Selected Stories 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.

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Author Information

Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera Garza is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Taiga Syndrome, available from Dorothy, a publishing project. Originally written in Spanish, her books have been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and more. Born in Mexico in 1964, she has lived in the United States since 1989, and is currently a distinguished professor in Hispanic studies and the director of creative writing at the University of Houston.

Sarah Booker is a literary translator and doctoral candidate in Hispanic Literature at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where she studies contemporary Latin American narrative and translation studies. Her translations include Cristina Rivera Garza's The Iliac Crest and Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country and Mónica Ojeda's Jawbone.

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