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.

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.

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.

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 that push 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.

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.

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.

Lobo, the protagonist of this engrossing novel about life on the border between Mexico and the United States, has no education to speak of but possesses an amazing talent for converting any notable event into an epic ballad. When the local drug kingpin discovers him, Lobo becomes the kingdom's artist-in-residence. Through his songs, he captures life both within the court and outside of it, and though initially his compositions serve to glorify and popularize the cartel, they eventually play an integral part in its demise. With its lyrical and popular language, "Trabajos del reino" is a vivid portrayal of a world of slums, bars, brothels, drugs, guns, and death that will leave no reader unaffected. "Lobo, el protagonista de esta novela fascinante sobre la vida en la frontera de Mexico con los Estados Unidos, no posee educacion pero le sobra talento para convertir los sucesos notables en baladas epicas. Cuando el cabecilla de una banda local de narcoticos topa con el, Lobo se convierte en el juglar del reino. A traves de sus canciones, describe la vida tanto dentro de la corte como fuera de ella, y aunque al principio sus composiciones sirven para glorificar y popularizar el cartel, juegan a la larga un papel integral en su desaparicion. Con su lenguaje lirico y popular, "Trabajos del reino" es un retrato vivido de un mundo de arrabales, cantinas, prostibulos, drogas, armas y muerte que no dejara de afectar a ningun lector."

A gripping reflection of life on the border between the United States and Mexico, this novel combines contemporary sensibilities with pre-Colombian myth as it relates the story of Makina, a young, temperamental, and free-spirited girl searching for her missing brother. Throughout her journey, Makina is forced to rely on her ingenuity to survive nine legendary quests in a hostile and dangerous world. Borrowing liberally from Western and indigenous mythic traditions, the story reframes a familiar struggle--that of undocumented immigrants--in an imaginative and unique way, while never compromising the fundamental and moving humanity of its heroine. "Una apasionante reflexion de la vida en la frontera de los Estados Unidos y Mexico, esta novela combina sensibilidades modernas con la mitologia precolombina mientras relata la historia de Makina, una joven temperamental y libre que busca a su hermano desaparecido. A lo largo de su camino, Makina tiene que depender de su ingenio para completar nueve etapas mitologicas en un mundo hostil y peligroso. Con referencias miticas provenientes tanto de la tradicion occidental como de la indigena, esta historia presenta una lucha familiar--la de los inmigrantes indocumentados--en una manera imaginativa y unica, pero nunca comprometa la humanidad fundamental y conmovedora de su heroina."