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.

Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital. She has learned to say this flatly and without emotion, the way she says her name (Marina), her doll's name (also Marina) and her age (seven). Her parents were killed in a car crash and now she lives in the orphanage with the other little girls. But Marina is not like the other little girls. In the curious, hyperreal, feverishly serious world of childhood, Marina and the girls play games of desire and warfare. The daily rituals of playtime, lunchtime and bedtime are charged with a horror; horror is licked by the dark flames of love. When Marina introduces the girls to Marina the Doll, she sets in motion a chain of events from which there can be no release. With shades of Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Guillermo Del Toro and Mariana Enriquez, Such Small Hands is a beautifully controlled tour-de-force, a bedtime story to keep readers awake.

The Mexico we hear of in the news - the drug cartels, migration and senseless violence - is rich soil for Herrera's moving stories of people who live in this reality but also live in the timeless realm of myth, epic and fairy tale, such as the singer Lobo in Kingdom Cons who loves the drug lord's own 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. These three novels get to the heart of the matter in a truly original way. They are storytelling that is at once timely and timeless.

"Yuri Herrera is Mexico's greatest novelist. "Signs Preceding the End of the World" delivers a darkly mythological vision of the US as experienced by the 'not us' that is harrowing and fierce."--Francisco Goldman, author of "Say Her Name"

"Yuri Herrera's "Signs Preceding the End of the World" is a masterpiece, a haunting and moving allegory about violence and the culture built to support and celebrate that violence. Of the writers of my generation, the one I most admire is Yuri Herrera."--Daniel Alarcon, author of "At Night We Walk in Circles"

Makina knows how to survive in a macho world. Leaving her native Mexico in search of her brother, she's smuggled into the United States bearing two secret messages--one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

In this grippingly original novel Yuri Herrera explores the actual and psychological crossings and translations people make--with their feet, in their minds, and in their language as they move from one country to another, especially when there's no going back.

Born in Actopan, Mexico, in 1970, Yuri Herrera's "Signs Preceding the End of the World" is being published in a number of languages, as is "The Transmigration of Bodies," which is forthcoming in English from And Other Stories in 2015. He teaches at the Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Translator Lisa Dillman is based in Atlanta, Georgia, where she translates Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American writers and teaches in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University.

One day, the children begin to show up in the subtropical town of San Cristobal, unwashed and hungry. No one knows where they have come from or where they disappear to each night. And then they rob a supermarket and stab two adults, bringing fear to the town. So begins a thrilling morality tale that retraces the lines between good and evil, the civil and the wild, dragging our assumptions about childhood and innocence out into the light.

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 noir romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

Drama3m, 3f Simple Set When Zell Preston inherits her father's struggling pecan farm and moves back to her childhood home in Fronteras, New Mexico, she fi nds that the once tight-knit border community has changed radically. The government has cracked down on the undocumented immigrant population, dividing families and pitting neighbor against neighbor. Chuy Gallegos, foreman at the Preston farm for 30 years, wants the piece of land he says Zell's father promised him long ago. Ines Sandoval and her sister Angie Zelaya lobby for the return of their recently deported aunt. Angie's husband Carl Zelaya defends to his community and family his choice to work for the Border Patrol. And Cooper Daniels, industrial pecan grower and head of a civilian border surveillance group, forges ahead with a volunteer-built fence. These forces collide in Ground, which examines the human costs of immigration policies, and the strength of personal beliefs about family, home, and civil rights in the face of a shifting political and social landscape.

GROUND premiered at the 2010 Humana Festival of New American Plays."Breathtaking in every way." -- Charles Whaley, TotalTheater.com..".Tackles the hot-button issue of illegal immigration." -- David Shreward, Back Stage"The hot-button topic of controlling illegal immigration is presented in a highly personal context, so that the characters make choices based on distinct and individual motivations that are well delineated in the writing. It is an engrossing drama..." - Keith Waits, Theatre Louisville

Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age 'when women dry up,' as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this act may bring more than just affection into her home. The Bitch is written in a prose as terse as the villagers, with storms - both meteorological and emotional - lurking around each corner. Beauty and dread live side by side in this poignant exploration or the many meanings of motherhood and love.

From the author of National Book Award 2021 Finalist The Bitch Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly speaks a word, while her unhappy mother spends her days reading celebrity lifestyle magazines, tending to her enormous collection of plants, and filling Claudia's head with stories about women who end their lives in tragic ways. Then an interloper arrives, disturbing the delicate balance of family life, and Claudia's world starts falling apart. In this strikingly vivid portrait of Cali, Colombia, Claudia's acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them. In Abyss, Quintana leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment.

On March 10, 1920, in Pachuca, Mexico, the Compania 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.

2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINALIST In Colombia's brutal jungle, childless Damaris develops an intense and ultimately doomed relationship with an orphaned puppy. "The magic of this sparse novel is its ability to talk about many things, all of them important, while seemingly talking about something else entirely. What are those things? Violence, loneliness, resilience, cruelty. Quintana works wonders with her disillusioned, no-nonsense, powerful prose." Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling "The Bitch is a novel of true violence. Artist that she is, Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn't know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them." Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. In this constant struggle, nothing is taken for granted. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age "when women dry up," as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this act may bring more than just affection into her home. The Bitch is written in a prose as terse as the villagers, with storms both meteorological and emotional lurking around each corner. Beauty and dread live side by side in this poignant exploration of the many meanings of motherhood and love.

"Wholly compelling." --Colm Toibin "A captivating piece of storytelling."--Boston Globe A new novel from a Spanish literary star about the arrival of feral children to a tropical city in Argentina, and the quest to stop them from pulling the place into chaos. San Cristobal was an unremarkable city--small, newly prosperous, contained by rain forest and river. But then the children arrived. No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city's own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos. Narrated by the social worker who led the hunt, A Luminous Republic is a suspenseful, anguished fable that "could be read as Lord of the Flies seen from the other side, but that would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world" (Juan Gabriel Vasquez).

By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner "An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from Colombian writer Quintana (The Bitch). Readers will be dazzled." -Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly speaks a word, while her unhappy mother spends her days reading celebrity lifestyle magazines, tending to her enormous collection of plants, and filling Claudia's head with stories about women who end their lives in tragic ways. Then an interloper arrives, disturbing the delicate balance of family life, and Claudia's world starts falling apart. In this strikingly vivid portrait of Cali, Colombia, Claudia's acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them. In Abyss, Quintana leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment.

A 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 Bolano 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.

"Elegant" --"Marie Claire"

"Funny and revelatory." --"New York Times Book Review"

"Deeply accessible, deeply moving." --"Los Angeles Times"

"The Polish Boxer" covers a vast landscape of human experience while enfolding a search for origins: a grandson tries to make sense of his Polish grandfather's past and the story behind his numbered tattoo; a Serbian classical pianist longs for his forbidden heritage; a Mayan poet is torn between his studies and filial obligations; a striking young Israeli woman seeks answers in Central America; a university professor yearns for knowledge that he can't find in books and discovers something unexpected at a Mark Twain conference. Drawn to what lies beyond the range of reason, they all reach for the beautiful and fleeting, whether through humor, music, poetry, or unspoken words. Across his encounters with each of them, the narrator--a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon--pursues his most enigmatic subject: himself.

Mapping the geography of identity in a world scarred by a legacy of violence and exile, "The Polish Boxer "marks the debut of a major new Latin American voice in English.

Eduardo Halfon has been cited as among the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogota and is the recipient of Spain's prestigious Jose Maria de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue the story of "The Polish Boxer," which is his first novel to be published in English. He travels frequently to his native Guatemala and lives in Nebraska.

Eugenio Cambaceres was the first to introduce the naturalist manner of Émile Zola to Argentinean Literature in the late nineteenth century. The work of Cambaceres is crucial for an understanding of the period of consolidation of Argentina, the formation of national identity, and especially for the role of the intellectual in that transition. This generation theoretically and methodically built up a literature with features of its own, stressing the cultural primacy of Buenos Aires par excellence, to enhance the evolution a cosmopolitan metropolis.