Alberto Ruy Sánchez – författare

Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel Set in an imaginary walled city off the coast of Morocco, Mogador traces the days and nights of Fatma, a young woman who finds herself suddenly seized by desire. As she wanders the city's maze of erotic pleasures, she encounters other desiring bodies and the desperate worlds those desires create. Here is a vital fusion of Latin America magical realism with Arabic geometric and mystical imagery, written in a style the author calls a "prose of intensities." "This extremely talented Mexican writer...assumes is own Islamic roots in one of the best-written novels of recent years. He is truly a painter of dreams, who manages to fuse the most unblemished sensuality with the most transparent spirituality." -Luce Lopez Baralt "Memorable novella about being both untouched and seized-all described in prose that mixes dreamy arabesque with crystalline precision." -Kirkus Review "Ruy Sanchez balances a double paradox: his novella about female desire, written by a man, criticizes Islamic and Latin-American concepts of male dominance. It's a dazzling philosophical conundrum - a Sphinx-like riddle that only a king or a poet could solve.In any event, the pervasive desire in Mogador is particularized: it's the calling out of one body to another, one spirit to another, one soul to another...This infatuating novella is not about eroticism; it's about love." -William Hollinger, Boston Review Alberto Ruy Sanchez has written many works of fiction as well as literary and art criticism. He was an editor of Octavo Paz's Vuelta and is now editor and chief of Artes de Mexico. Mark Schafer has translated works by Virgilio Piniera and, with Cedric Belfrage, and The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.

The Jacarandas Whisper pays homage to the amazing jacaranda trees that transform Mexico City into a purple spectacle heralding the arrival of spring.Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez adds yet another “secret garden” to his opus of wonder. The Jacarandas Whisper is carefully structured into six sections of lyrical poems that reflect upon the paradoxical nature of the jacaranda trees, their immortal yet transient character, their origin myths, their multicultural history of migration, and the lessons they offer on the human condition. The book closes with a final “Resounding Coda” that celebrates the jacaranda’s power of communication: “She whispers things when silent, / and says even more if you listen.”

"Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry, and intelligence in a new geometry of words...His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity."-Octavio Paz "In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives, is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay they are made of. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breathes through the erotic."-Alberto Manguel In Mogador-the city of desire-a woman, tired of her lover's insensitivity, decides to pose a challenge to him: She will make love with him only when he tells her about a new garden in the city. The problem is that he must search for gardens where one least expects to find them, and he may not invent them. To discover hidden gardens, he will have to tune his most powerful impulses. Alberto Ruy-Sanchez examines the complex nature of enduring intimacy and the daily challenge of addressing the ever-changing desires of the other.He considers the perpetual quest to re-create the magical moment when paradise was first discovered in the body of the beloved. Alberto Ruy-Sanchez is a Mexican writer and author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, many of which have been translated, including his novel Mogador, published by City Lights Publishers in 1992. Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a professor of Spanish and the director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Her books of translation include The Entre Rios Trilogy by Perla Suez and Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction by Ana Maria Shua.