Yuri Herrera – författare

Winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book AwardSigns Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arrestingly singular novels to have been written in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

Shortlisted for the 2017 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Shortlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary AwardA plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace. Both his instincts and the vacant streets warn him to stay indoors, but The Redeemer ventures out into the city’s underbelly to arrange for the exchange of the bodies they hold hostage. Yuri Herrera’s novel is a response to the violence of contemporary Mexico. With echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Roberto Bolaño and Raymond Chandler, The Transmigration of Bodies is a noirish tragedy and a tribute to those bodies – loved, sanctified, lusted after, and defiled – that violent crime has touched.

In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part crime romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compañía de Santa Gertrudis—the largest employer in the region, and a subsidiary of the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company—may have committed murder. The alert was first raised at six in the morning: a fire was tearing through the El Bordo mine. After a brief evacuation, the mouths of the shafts were sealed. Company representatives hastened to assert that “no more than ten” men remained inside the mineshafts, and that all ten were most certainly dead. Yet when the mine was opened six days later, the death toll was not ten, but eighty-seven. And there were seven survivors.A century later, acclaimed novelist Yuri Herrera has reconstructed a workers’ tragedy at once globally resonant and deeply personal: Pachuca is his hometown. His work is an act of restitution for the victims and their families, bringing his full force of evocation to bear on the injustices that suffocated this horrific event into silence.

This collectible edition gathers in one beautifully crafted volume the three novels that have made Yuri Herrera’s reputation as one of the best and most revolutionary writers of the new millennium, adding a new preface from the author as well as notes from his Best Translated Book Award-winning translator Lisa Dillman.The Mexico we hear about in the news—with its vicious drug cartels, desperate migrants, and senseless violence—could only ever be one small part of the story. Hailing from a place beyond the stereotypes, behind the hardships of daily life, Yuri Herrera’s characters are castaways from the realms of myth, the epic, the fairy tale. There is the singer Lobo in Kingdom Cons, who loves a drug lord’s daughter; Makina, who crosses borders to find her brother in Signs Preceding the End of the World; and the Redeemer, a hard-boiled hero looking to broker peace between feuding families during a pandemic in The Transmigration of Bodies.

The characters that populate Yuri Herrera’s first collection of stories inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Borges’s Fictions and Calvino’s Cosmicomics, these very short stories signal a new dimension in the work of this significant writer.In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meagre bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition.This collection of stories, with a breadth that ranges from philosophical flights of fancy to the gritty detective story, leaves us with a sense of awe at our world and the worlds beyond our ken, while Herrera continues to develop his exploration of the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms.‘Brilliant, ecstatic and playful, Ten Planets is the work of one of the most original and prodigiously gifted writers at work today. The grammar of a nose, a skeleton in a shoebox, a consciousness acquiring bacterium and a sentient house – the infinite worlds of this story collection are further proof that Herrera is a writer of boundless talent.’ Katie Kitamura

New Orleans, 1853. A young Zapotec man named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp along with a small group of fellow political exiles from Mexico. Later, in 1858, he is to become the first indigenous Mexican president, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city. He falls in love with the music and food, but unavoidable, too, is the trade in human beings.A magnificent work of speculative history and a love letter to New Orleans.‘One of the most original and prodigiously gifted writers at work today.‘ Katie Kitamura

This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West is the second entry in the Divide anthology series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West. In this collection legends, myths, tales, omens, folk horror, and science fiction explore the fantastical, the apocalyptic, the bizarre, the unknown, and the apocryphal origins and conclusions of life on the occidental side of the Continental Divide. In this collection, after the ‘what is’ comes the ‘what will be’, as acclaimed authors and emerging voices weave tales thatpush the boundaries of imagination: Ken Liu takes us to the frontiers of America and China in a stark tale of perseverance; Kate Bernheimer immerses us in the fairytale lands of modern celebrity; Benjamin Percy takes us hunting for deer and connection in eastern Oregon; Yuri Herrera grants us insight on our future overlords; Tessa Fontaine places us in-between with a monster and a question; Dominique Dickey chases familiar ghosts; and Willy Vlautin takes us on the wild ride that is a winning streak. Accompanied by a foreword from This Side of the Divide alum, and author of The Forbidden City, Vanessa Hua, these twenty-five pieces of new lore excavate the beauty, the uncertainty, the longing, the bitter interactions and stark truths; the strong people and vivid places that have shaped, and will continue to shape the West until the end of days.