Brenda Lozano – författare

MAKE X collects memorable work published throughout the last ten years by beloved Chicago literary magazine MAKE. Through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and reviews, alongside new visual art portfolios, interviews, and stories from the editors, MAKE X honors a decade of storytelling and literary rabble-rousing in Chicago.

A bewitching novel by Brenda Lozano, one of the most prominent voices of the new generation of Latin American writers.'You can't really know another woman until you know yourself.'Weaving together two parallel narratives, this is the story of Feliciana, an indigenous curandera (healer), and of Zoë, a journalist: two women drawn together by the murder of Feliciana's cousin Paloma.In the tiny village of San Felipe in Jalisco province, where traditional ways of life and belief are a present reality, Feliciana tells the story of her life, her community's acceptance of her as a genuine curandera and the difficulties faced by her cousin Paloma who is a Muxe (both male and female), in her case a trans woman.Growing up in Mexico City, the heart of modern Mexico, Zoë attempts to find her way in a hostile world made for men, as she reflects on what drew her to Feliciana and Paloma, and her own relationship with the innate powers of a curandera.This extraordinary novel envisions the writer as healer, one who uses El Lenguaje (Language) to read El Libro (The Book) that contains the mystery of the world, and offers a generous and distinctly female way of understanding the complex world we all inhabit.Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary

Winner PEN Translates Award (UK)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 PEN Translates Award (UK)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.

Encuentro en las escritoras y escritores mexicanos nacidos a partir de 1975 un ánimo liberado –es decir: "desgeneracionalizado"–, así como una no pertenencia a grupos y tendencias: se trata, por así decirlo, de islas bañadas por el mismo mar y con corrientes comunicantes. Algunos de ellos se refugian en el realismo, aunque su realidad está trastocada por la violencia a la que hemos sido condenados (Antonio Ortuño y Oswaldo Zavala; en otro sentido, Mariel Iribe Zenil y Paulette Jonguitud); otras, recurren a la literatura como artefacto, desapegadas de las convenciones del mercado editorial (Daniela Bojórquez y Verónica Gerber). Y están también los que escriben al margen de todo, desprendidos incluso del país o de su terruño, en una prosa geográfica y emocional distinta (César Albarrán, Brenda Lozano, Daniel Espartaco Sánchez, Daniela Tarazona y Luis Panini).Como sea, esto es apenas una pequeña muestra de una amplia selección: en este primer volumen hay 11 de, digamos, más de 50; y vendrán otros 11 después, para conformar las 22 voces a las que el título alude.