Cristina Rivera Garza – författare

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIRA 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTA NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME AND NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR‘Meticulously written and deeply moving . . . A triumph’ JACKIE KAY‘Absorbing and poetic’ ECONOMIST‘Full of tenderness and beauty’ MARIANA ENRIQUEZFrom one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary writers, an astonishing work of non-fiction that illuminates an epidemic of femicide in Mexico through the death of one woman.I seek justice, I finally said. I seek justice for my sister . . . Sometimes it takes twenty-nine years to say it out loud, to say it out loud on a phone call with a lawyer at the General Attorney’s office: I seek justice.On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico's dark and relentless history of femicide.She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master's degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him.Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence – handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints – to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister’s voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem).  “Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza’s chronicle is both personal and political.”—The Washington PostA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads, Electric LitOctober 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of that quest .In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister’s history, depicting everything from Liliana’s early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence—handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones—to document her sister’s life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today.

A fiercely poetic, tenderly observed portrait of young women’s travels on the fringes of Mexico and the United States, by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Liliana’s Invincible SummerOne of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Most Anticipated Books of the YearIn this new collection of genre-defying stories by Cristina Rivera Garza, a woman visits what she thinks could be her old lover's hometown after being abandoned by her, years earlier. Two herons hitchhike across Mexico. A group of workers build a new home, only to see it destroyed by the state.With little baggage and much bravado, the characters in Terrestrial hitchhike, migrate, take trains, wander or, at times, fly, to survive the mandates of patriarchy and capitalism. On dusty roads or by a lake turned suddenly ominous, they remain in close contact with the earth's surface, sensing its wild promise and capacity for violence, its degradation and enduring beauty.As she did in her Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza forges new forms, experimenting with structure and time as she tails the intrepid travelers with shimmering and honest prose. Combining journalism, novelistic writing, and themes of female freedom, gore capitalism, and class struggle, Terrestrial is a meditation on travel and distance, and our ties to the earth we tread on.

La CastaÑeda Insane Asylum is the first inside view of the workings of La CastaÑeda General Insane Asylum - a public mental health institution founded in Mexico City in 1910 only months before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. It links life within the asylum's walls to the radical transformations brought about as Mexico entered the Revolution's armed phase and then endured under succeeding modernizing regimes.Author Cristina Rivera Garza brings the history of La CastaÑeda asylum to life as inmates, doctors, relatives, and others engage in dialogues on insanity. They discuss faith, sex, poverty, loss, resentment, envy, love, and politics. Doctors translated what they heard into the emerging language of psychiatry, while inmates conveyed their personal experiences and private histories through expressions of mental suffering. The language of pain - physical and spiritual, mild to excruciating - allowed patients to detail the sources and consequences of their misfortune.Available now for the first time in English, this edition contains updated sources and features a note by the translator, Laura Kanost.

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays of this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality-a term used by anthropologist Floriberto DÍaz to describe modes of life of indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor-permeating all writing processes.Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities in which it grew. In an increasingly violent world, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may as well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays of this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality-a term used by anthropologist Floriberto DÍaz to describe modes of life of indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor-permeating all writing processes.Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities in which it grew. In an increasingly violent world, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may as well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together five artists, thinkers, and writers who proposed new ways of being and discussed radical visions for the future. Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World captures and expands these lectures to illuminate our path toward this possible beautiful world. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) asserts that “for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Film curator JanaÍna Oliveira (Brazil) evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality. Visual artist Phoebe Boswell (UK/Kenya) asks, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next?” Saidiya Hartman (US) prompts us to consider our capacity to burn, examining whether “the gift of pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” Cristina Rivera Garza (US/Mexico) gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, “the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.” Each alchemist is intimately concerned with this cargo, our ability to bear its weight, and how we might find the beautiful world together.

The second annual Alchemy Lecture brought together five artists, thinkers, and writers who proposed new ways of being and discussed radical visions for the future. Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World captures and expands these lectures to illuminate our path toward this possible beautiful world. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) asserts that “for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Film curator JanaÍna Oliveira (Brazil) evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality. Visual artist Phoebe Boswell (UK/Kenya) asks, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next?” Saidiya Hartman (US) prompts us to consider our capacity to burn, examining whether “the gift of pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” Cristina Rivera Garza (US/Mexico) gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, “the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.” Each alchemist is intimately concerned with this cargo, our ability to bear its weight, and how we might find the beautiful world together.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIRA 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTA NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME AND NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR''Meticulously written and deeply moving . . . A triumph'' JACKIE KAY''Absorbing and poetic'' ECONOMIST''Full of tenderness and beauty'' MARIANA ENRIQUEZFrom one of Mexico''s greatest contemporary writers, an astonishing work of non-fiction that illuminates an epidemic of femicide in Mexico through the death of one woman.I seek justice, I finally said. I seek justice for my sister . . . Sometimes it takes twenty-nine years to say it out loud, to say it out loud on a phone call with a lawyer at the General Attorney''s office: I seek justice.On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza''s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico''s dark and relentless history of femicide.She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master''s degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him.Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence – handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints – to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister''s voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIRA 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTA NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, TIME AND NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR''Meticulously written and deeply moving . . . A triumph'' JACKIE KAY''Absorbing and poetic'' ECONOMIST''Full of tenderness and beauty'' MARIANA ENRIQUEZFrom one of Mexico''s greatest contemporary writers, an astonishing work of non-fiction that illuminates an epidemic of femicide in Mexico through the death of one woman.I seek justice, I finally said. I seek justice for my sister . . . Sometimes it takes twenty-nine years to say it out loud, to say it out loud on a phone call with a lawyer at the General Attorney''s office: I seek justice.On the dawn of 16 July 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, Cristina Rivera Garza''s sister, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and subsumed into Mexico''s dark and relentless history of femicide.She was a twenty-year-old architecture student who had been trying for years to end her relationship with a high school boyfriend who insisted on not letting her go. A few weeks before the tragedy, Liliana made a definitive decision: at the height of her winter she had discovered that, as Albert Camus had said, there was an invincible summer in her. She would leave him behind. She would start a new life. She would do a master''s degree and a doctorate; she would travel to London. But his decision was that she would not have a life without him.Returning to Mexico after decades of living in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza collects and curates evidence – handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, voice recordings and architectural blueprints – to defy a pattern of increasingly normalised, gendered violence and understand the life lost. What she finds is Liliana: her sister''s voice crossing time and, like that of so many disappeared and outraged women in Mexico, demanding justice.

''A labyrinthine masterpiece'' New York Times''A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story'' TIME''Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory'' Layla MartinezA city is always a cemetery.When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ''Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.'' After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers

A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2025A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla MartinezA city is always a cemetery.When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’ After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers

''A labyrinthine masterpiece'' New York Times''A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story'' TIME''Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory'' Layla MartinezA city is always a cemetery.When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ''Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.'' After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers

A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2025A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla Martinezbeware of me, my lovebeware of the silent woman in the desert…These are the words the Professor finds, scrawled in nail polish, above the mutilated corpse of a man.She reports the crime to the police and becomes the first informant in an investigation led by the Detective, who has a newfound obsession with poetry. As the bodies of more men are discovered alongside cryptic lines of verse, it becomes clear that this is only one in a string of crimes – all connected, all with literary clues.As the Professor becomes wrapped up in the murders, the boundaries of story – and of genre – break down. Can the Detective decipher the meaning of the poems in time to stop the spread of violence?Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LILIANA'S INVINCIBLE SUMMER AND DEATH TAKES MEWe come from far away and, all of a sudden, we no longer know where we are going.In Terrestrial, we follow travellers who carry little but longing and a sense of possibility. A woman returns to the town of a lover who once abandoned her, walking its streets listening for an echo. Two girls ride a train in search of a lake that may only exist in memory and myth. A group of workers build a temporary shelter, only to see it razed in an instant. These characters hitchhike, drift, wander, or at times, fly, to resist the forces that try to contain them. On dusty, sun-baked roads they remain close to the earth’s surface, sensing its tremors, its wounds, its wild promise and enduring beauty.Blending memoir, reportage and fiction, Rivera Garza bends form into something elemental and new, reshaping the boundaries of writing as she tails these young travellers. Terrestrial is a fierce and tender meditation on what it means to move through the world as a woman, on the landscapes that mark us, and our ties to the earth we tread on.Translated by Christina MacSweeneyPRAISE FOR CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA:'One of Mexico's greatest living writers' JONATHAN LETHEM'An explosive writer ... with a powerful style, an evocative and indomitable language' LINA MERUANE'A masterful storyteller' JENNIFER CLEMENT

On a dark and stormy night, an unnamed narrator is visited by two women: one a former lover, the other a stranger. They ruthlessly question their host and claim to know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. In increasingly desperate attempts to defend his masculinity, perplexed by the stranger’s dubious claims to be the writer Amparo Dávila, he finds himself spiralling deeper into a haunted past that may or may not be his own.This surreal novel enfolds a masterful exploration of gender in taut, atmospheric mystery.

Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson AwardA fairy tale run amok, The Taiga Syndrome follows an unnamed Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple that has fled to the far reaches of the Earth. A betrayed husband is convinced by a brief telegram that his second ex-wife wants him to track her down – that she wants to be found. He hires the Ex-Detective, who sets out with a translator into a snowy, hostile forest where strange things happen and translation serves to betray both sense and the senses. The stories of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective’s quest. As she enters a territory overrun with the primitive excesses of capitalism – accumulation and expulsion, corruption and cruelty –the lessons of her journey unfold: that sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.