Text and audio here.
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Dans la catégorie roman étranger!
Translated by Lise Belperron and published by Éditions Globe
Full article here
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Sí, contiene "El hombre que siempre soñó", el relato que, traducido al inglés como "Dream Man" por Francisca González-Arias, fue seleccionado para el Premio O. Henry de Ficción Breve 2023.
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#LILIANARIVERAGARZA PRESENTE!
#JusticiaParaLiliana
#JusticiaParaTodas
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The New York Times published my review of Azam Ahmed's Fear is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother's Quest for Vengeance, September 26, 2023.
"Drawing on four years of meticulous archival and field research, as well as countless interviews, scholarly works and his own journalism, Ahmed, a former Mexico bureau chief (and current investigative correspondent) for The New York Times, lifts the veil on daily life in a war-torn zone. While people employ the phrase “war on drugs” to mean an effort to combat illegal trafficking, or, worse, as a euphemism for state-sanctioned violence, Ahmed sets out to prove that in Mexico cartels have behaved as occupying armies on newly gained territory, governing by force and submitting local communities to increasingly spectacular acts of cruelty. The so-called war on drugs shows its truest face here: as a war against the civilian population. Ahmed’s book is a study of how such a war touches every aspect of social life, tearing it to pieces, and how the impunity with which cartels operate perpetuates a never-ending cycle of evil."
Full article here.
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LILIANA GOES PLACES!
Two Longlisted titles collect, inspect, and make meaning of documents of the past to imagine new futures. Ordinary Notes gathers personal and public artifacts that cover everything from history, art, photography, and literature, to beauty, memory, and language. Across 248 notes, Christina Sharpe examines the legacy of white supremacy and slavery, crowdsources entries for a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and presents a kaleidoscopic narrative that celebrates the Black American experience. Inspired by global feminist movements, Cristina Rivera Garza travels to Mexico City to recover her sister’s unresolved case file nearly 30 years after she was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Drawing on police reports, notebooks, handwritten letters, and interviews from those who were closest to her, Rivera Garza preserves her sister’s legacy and examines how violence against women affects everyone, regardless of gender, in Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice.
Read full article here.
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"Rejoicing Materiality: A Geological Writing by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara," Latin American Literatures in Global Markets. The World Inside, ed. by Mabel Moraña and Ana Gallego Cuiñas, (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 78-87.
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"Geological Writings," Latin American Literature in Transition, 1980-2018, ed. by Monica Szurmuk and Debra Castillo, (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15-29.
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Read full article here.
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"Femicider: We Can Only Fight against What We Can Name," was published by Words Without Borders. The Home for International Literature, on August 7, 2023.
A translation embracing the radical meanings of a word, carrying with it the wound and the rage and the hope, all combined, will be able to advance, for example, networks of solidarity across borders. Such translation may well teach us to see violence—specifically gender violence and femicide—not as an essentialist trait belonging, and limited to, certain countries or communities, but as a structural wound stemming from inequalities we can rally against as we amplify calls for gender justice worldwide. He is a femicider, not a killer, and he is no longer laughing, I will say, without vacillation, next time I am asked, hoping, with Max Granger, “to play a small role in ushering the term into the English language and normalizing its usage.”
Read full article here
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YA PRONTO!
Mi traducción al español del poderoso libro de la poeta nortemericana Danielle Pafunda.
Publica Dharma Books.
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Escribí este texto para la última sesión del Laboratorio de No Ficción Creativa del 2022-2023. Lo publicó la revista Anfibia de junio 2023, en la sección de ensayo, Fronteras Narrativas Contemporáneas.
Gracias a Cristián Alarcón y Matías Máximo desde Anfibia; y a las que dirigieron los talleres durante el año: Ana Laura Pérez, Nona Fernández, Yasnaya Aguilar, Gabriela Wiener.
Toda escritura es escritura de la imaginación. Pero en el plano de las definiciones -siempre oscilantes- el vínculo con lo real es la línea que divide ficción/no ficción, y es allí donde aparece una de las primeras disputas: ¿Quién tiene derecho a imaginar? ¿Quién puede producir presente? “La ficción ha reclamado egoísta y tramposamente a la imaginación solo para sí”, dice la escritora Cristina Rivera Garza, directora académica del Laboratorio de No Ficción Creativa y fundadora del doctorado en Escritura Creativa en Español de la Universidad de Houston. En este ensayo Rivera Garza resume algunas de las tensiones que surgieron a lo largo de las seis conferencias que dictó en el Laboratorio, y deja claves para pensar las fronteras narrativas contemporáneas, donde “el valor no está en la novedad del cruce de géneros, que nos viene de tiempo y no hemos descubierto ayer, sino directamente de su roce con la materialidad, entendida ésta como un trabajo colaborativo de afecto y sentido en comunidades específicas”.
Lo pueden consultar aquí.
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Fui a Belfast, y me acordé.
Y luego escribí esta crónica que es, como todo lo que tiene que ver con la memoria, mitad ficción y mitad deseo y mitad algo más. Julia O´Bradeigh--la pelirroja atroz, la tránsfuga, la cómplice--apareció por primera vez en La guerra no importa, mi primer libro de cuentos (publicado de nueva cuenta no hace mucho por Dharma Books como Andamos perras, andamos diablas).
Gatopardo publicó el texto el 7 de junio del 2023. Lo pueden leer aquí.
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"El diminuto mecanismo de las máquinas que sueñan", prólogo de esta edición, es de la poeta mexicana Sara Uribe. Muchas gracias.
Gracias también a Fernanda Álvarez y su equipo por el cuidado editorial.
Aquí vamos.
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Thanks to Petra Strain for the German translation of La mujer de los Cárpatos / The Carpathian Woman, a short story included in La frontera más distante, published by Tusquets in 2008, and again by Literature Random House this year. The English translation, by Alex Ross, is included in New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Project, 2022).
Thanks to Lettre International, of course. Summer issue 2023.
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I talked at length about migration and borders with visual artist Ekaterina Murumseva. She transformed our words into this watercolor (318 x 200 cms).
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Cristina Rivera Garza
“Dream Man,” translated from the Spanish by Francisca González-Arias, Freeman’s
Announcing the Winners of the 2023O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction here
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A short story translated by Sarah Booker at The Yale Review.
The person who was driving these narrow country roads, now skillfully avoiding the body of some nocturnal animal, was as bitter as the saliva he couldn’t swallow. I screamed it to the heavens: I am not a happy man. I shouted it out to the deer that forced me to screech to a stop in the middle of the road, the deer that kept looking at me with its big, bright eyes as I got out of my car and fell to my knees on the asphalt, crying. Who are you? I yelled. What the hell are you doing out here? I realized it was just a fawn, cocking its head to the left. I said it once I could finally stand and get back in the car, looking into the rearview mirror: I am not a happy man. I am barely a man.
Translated by Sarah Booker.
Full text: The Yale Review.
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INSITE is pleased to announce the fifth issue of the INSITE Journal: Speech Acts. The publication, edited by Andrea Torreblanca, explores speech, language, and the performative as forms of political action. It includes the script and documentation of Speech Acts, a short play that was developed from fragments of writings and recorded dialog culled from the INSITE Archive, and presented in Mexico City (2021); a conversation between Museo Jumex Chief Curator Kit Hammonds and Andrea Torreblanca; a recent interview with the artist Andrea Fraser; a text republished and translated for the first time into Spanish by author, curator, and filmmaker AriellaAïsha Azoulay; and commissioned essays by theoretician and architect Keller Easterling and writer Cristina Rivera Garza.
In “Art and Enactment” (2022), Andrea Fraser explains her interest in using the term enactment as a process that occurs and evolves from the psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious and the compulsory. In the essay “Another Part of Speech” (2022), Keller Easterling outlines forms of sovereignty as solidarities that are not reduced to specific places but are rather atomized and mobile. In “Unlearning Our Colonial Languages, On Language and Belonging” (2021), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay traces in retrospect the complexity of her genealogy and identity that she describes as “impacted by two colonial projects: a descendant of the colonized in Algeria, and a daughter of colonizers in Palestine.” Cristina Rivera Garza writes the text “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Femicide?” (2022), which departs from the infamous case of the murder of her sister in the 1990s, to speak about how narratives, which only recently were defined as femicides, have focused on the perspective of the perpetrators, including the grammar used to prosecute them, and on literature, where the stories fictionalize—if not justify—the motives behind a crime.
INSITE Journal 05 Speech Acts here.
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Bajo el piso transparente de la alberca que se encuentra en el edificio donde se entregó este premio que reconoce a la literatura vasca e internacional.
Gracias, Bilbao!
Artículo completo aquí.
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María Teresa Priego registró el lenguaje de las pancartas de este 8 de marzo, incluidas las que invocaron a #LilianaRiveraGarza.
”La hermana asesinada de la escritora Cristina Rivera Garza está presente: “Liliana, tu verano es invencible”. Qué libro extraordinario el que Cristina escribió para ella/con ella: “El invencible verano de Liliana”.
Artículo entero aquí.
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By Hamilton Cane
March 2, 2023
Just before the world locked down, Rivera Garza canvassed the capital, accompanied by her husband and friend as they tried to locate files connected to Liliana’s murder. Despite three decades her agony was — is — still raw, as is that of her aged parents, and her quest for justice is re-created in her punctilious, fury-driven, incandescent memoir, “Liliana’s Invincible Summer.”
Despite her furnace of rage, Rivera Garza maintains perfect composure throughout “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” her first written in English without the help of a translator. (A Spanish edition, “El Invencible Verano de Liliana,” came out last year.) Each tightly drawn chapter showcases an array of gorgeous images or cadences; few authors deploy fragments as brilliantly, like grenades.
Full text by Hamilton Cane here
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A SISTER´S MURDER AND THE LANGUAGE OF VIOLENCE
New York Times, Sunday, February 26, 2023
"This collaged portrait is one of the most effective resurrections of a murder victim I have ever read (and I have read many). Rivera Garza draws her sister, then complicates that drawing and then complicates the complication, creating layer upon layer of nuance."
Katherine Dykstra
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[Translated by Max Granger]
In May 2021, only a few days after the publication of El invencible verano de Liliana – the book, available in English on February 28, in which I explore the femicide that claimed the life of Liliana Rivera Garza, my younger sister, on July 16, 1990 in Mexico City – I announced that I had created a Gmail account (elinvencibleveranodeliliana@gmail.com) with the intention of collecting any information on Ángel González Ramos, my sister’s ex-boyfriend at the time of her death, who still had (and still has) an arrest warrant out as her alleged murderer. I knew that Ángel González Ramos had evaded justice, but I had no idea how he had done it. In August of that same year, an email appeared in the inbox stating, plainly and succinctly, that Ángel González Ramos had been living in southern California under the name Mitchell Angelo Giovanni and had died on May 2, 2020 after drowning in Marina del Rey. Could this be true? Wasn’t it too much a coincidence that after 30 years, and just as the case had finally been brought to light, the alleged murderer would die under such strange circumstances? Was it possible he had faked his own death to evade justice?
The message came with a link to access his digital wake (it was 2020, and we were beginning to witness how the pandemic would affect our funeral rites) that included, in addition to condolences written from Mexico by people with the surname González Ramos, a series of photographs that documented the life of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni, from his birth on April 18, 1967 (the same birthdate as Ángel González Ramos) to the present. In the photographs was the boy with light eyes and blonde hair; the teenager in his leather jacket; the grown man with his thick neck and thinning hair, who, in different poses and among different company, never once stopped laughing. In all of the images of Mitchell Angelo Giovanni as an adult, he is smiling indiscriminately. Over and over again, as if it were a tic. He would peel back his lips and show his teeth, big and blindingly white. He would laugh at long-haired little girls, alongside young women, in the middle of family gatherings. He would smile next to Christmas trees and smile looking out at the ocean. Was he smiling at justice, knowing he had outwitted the law once again? Was he laughing at Liliana, telling her how after all these years he had come out on top – that he was still alive, while she lay, forever silenced, in a grave? Was he laughing at me, for failing to track him down? Was he laughing out of shame?
Was he laughing at you?
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