Faces in the Crowd

Valeria Luisellis lovely and eccentric first novel is . . . peppered with arresting imagery.New York Times Luisellis haunting debut novel . . . erodes the concrete borders of everyday life with a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of dissappearance. [T]his elegant novel speaks to the transience of reality. The elusive strands of the young woman and Owens narratives intertwine and blur together as Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition.Publishers Weekly, Boxed Review [A] lovely and mysterious first novel...the multilayered bok she has devised brings freshness and excitement to such complex inquiries.Wall Street Journal Throughout Faces in the CrowdSidewalks are a wonderful contribution to the long tradition by which authors re-imagine their cities as dream-like spaces created for them to wander around, daydream and discover.Los Angeles Times A masterwork of fractured identities and shifting realities, Faces in the Crowd is a lyric meditation on love, mortality, ghosts, and the desire to transform our human wreckage into art, to be saved by creation. Valeria Luiselli is a stunning and singular voice. Her work burns with an urgency that demands our attention. Read her. Right now.Laura Van Den Berg, The Isle of Youth If every word, for her, has the shadow of two others behind it, and if every city in which she lives carries the ghostly afterimage of all the other cities she has knownas well as the voices of the writers she has researched upon her arrivalthen her books become all the more enthralling for the multiplicity they champion . . . the great beauty of her art is seeing all her contrasting stories collapse or blend or combine into an unexpected whole.Los Angeles Review of Books Valeria Luiselli draws readers assuredly into a meditation on time, place and identity as if she were expertly kneading dough.Kathe Connair, Minneapolis Star Tribune Valeria Luisellis Faces in the Crowd is like nothing Ive read in a while . . . its musings on obsession and ambition are haunting, and its sense of place is fantastic.Electric Literature Today, shes one of the hottest authors around. Her first work, Faces in the Crowd, and its companion essay collection, Sidewalks, are both hits with critics.Ozy A mother in Mexico City starts writing a novel, and then the novel sort of becomes her life. (Pair with strong coffee.)Bustle "Luisselli delivers a telling image of modern time."Literature and Arts of the Americas Faces in the Crowd is a scaffolding that bounds the empty spaces into which the writer and the reader of the novel can insert their imagination . . . It is empty attention, if not the amazement, of the read and the writer.Electric Literature "Valeria Luisellis swirling, layered novel, Faces in the Crowd, shares this 'tell what it was like' quality."Missouri Review Well-crafted, playful even as it touches on the very serious....[Faces in the Crowd is] an impressively substantial work, in every sense.Complete Review Faces in the Crowd is one of those rare books that manages to upend ones idea of what might be possible in fiction.Electric Literature [Faces in the Crowd] paints a truly believable and empathetic and insightful portrait of life. It grabs hold of and dissects and analyzes life in all of its multifaceted glory and misery and whatever falls in between.Three Percent Valeria Luisellis extraordinary debut novel Faces in the Crowd signals the arrival of major talent, said Jeremy Ellis of Houstons Brazos Bookstore. Written in Spanish and exquisitely translated by Christina MacSweeney, Faces in the Crowd is a fresh and essential voice for the new Latin-American canon."American Booksellers Association Prose is for those with a builders spirt. What a ni

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novel and essays have been translated into many languages and her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's. Some of her recent projects include a ballet libretto for the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center in 2010; a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London; and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. She lives in New York City.