From award-winning Mexican author Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and the visionary Mexican designer Alejandro Magallanes comes a horror story and ghost story that is both daringly and beautifully told in word and image. There are stories so terrible that we tremble to hear even a whisper of them. Even more terrible, some of them are true.This is one such story, a story of our deepest inhumanity—one that confronts the history of violence against children, and through its young narrator attempts to find a way out. A horror story and ghost story told as much through art as through text, The Book of Denial is an antidote to our collective silence. By uplifting storytelling as a means of understanding the past and shaping the future, it is also—improbably—a beacon of hope. Written by genre-defying Mexican author Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, The Book of Denial is a dark and powerful story within a story, illustrated with a striking graphic sensibility by Alejandro Magallanes and translated by Lawrence Schimel. This is the third book to appear under Unruly, an imprint of picture books for older readers, and will include a short note to readers about how it continues to build this experimental framework of visually complex, sophisticated picture books for teens and adults.

In 1624, Giovanni Battista Braccelli an artist from Florence, Italy created a series of imaginary characters composed of elements like clouds, diamond shaped tiles, chains and kitchen equipment. He gave these the title “Bizzarie�. Thanks to Covid and the lockdown, Alejandro Magallanes decided to compensate for the lack of social contact by creating fantastical people himself too. What was once called “Bizzarie� now becomes a search for human contact. An artist seldom knows how the public is going to react to his work. Magallanes gave poet Tedi López Mills space for creation, whereby she gave each of the characters personal attention and wrote her texts on the same page.