Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner): A Sister's Search for Justice

A haunting, unforgettable memoir about a beloved younger sister and the painful memory of her murder, from "one of Mexico's greatest living writers" (Jonathan Lethem). &nbsp; 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. September 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 wrote 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--and Cristina knows there is only a slim chance of recovering the file. And yet, inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, she embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana's Invincible Summer is the account--and the outcome--of that extraordinary quest. &nbsp; In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: that of a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Following her decision to recover her sister's file, Rivera Garza traces the history of Liliana's life, from her early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man, to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when Liliana loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before. &nbsp; Using her remarkable talents 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 render and understand a life beyond the crime itself. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, Rivera Garza confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines from multiple angles how this tragedy continues to shape who she is--and what she fights for--today.

Rivera-Garza, Cristina

Parenting & Relationships

Hogarth

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK&nbsp;* "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). &nbsp; "Part memoir, part true-crime story, Garza's chronicle is both personal and political."--The Washington Post A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Chicago Public Library, She Reads October 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.

Death Takes Me: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Literary

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. &nbsp;

La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (Critical Mexican Studies)

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays in 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 the 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.\nDisappropriating 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 from which it grew. In a world rife with violence, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

Essays & Correspondence

Vanderbilt University Press

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays in 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 the 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 from which it grew. In a world rife with violence, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

Fairy tale meets detective drama in this David Lynch-like novel by a writer Jonathan Lethem calls "one of Mexico's greatest...we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer." Fiction. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. A fairy tale run amok, THE TAIGA SYNDROME follows an unnamed female Ex-Detective as she searches for a couple who 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 betrays both sense and one's senses. Tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood haunt the Ex-Detective's quest, though the lessons of her journey are more experiential than moral: that just as love can fly away, sometimes unloving flies away as well. That sometimes leaving everything behind is the only thing left to do.

The Taiga Syndrome

United States

Dorothy, a publishing project

The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists - agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies - convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book. Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that 'for this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.' Informed by her practice of 'curation as care,' Brazilian film curator Janaina Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: 'it's almost by falling that you live... The beautiful world dances then stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing.' Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, 'If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?' and gestures toward the possibility of this 'as yet unlived, unexperienced thing.' Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that 'Pragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.' And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which 'lays the groundwork for the irruption The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.' Each Alchemist is intimately concerned with the shape of this cargo and our ability to bear its weight, together. Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world.

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023

Politics & Social Sciences

Hartman, Saidiya

Pierce, Joseph M.

Boswell, Phoebe

Oliveira, Janaína

Social Sciences

Alchemy by Knopf Canada

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture

Philosophy

Duke University Press Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rivera-Garza, Cristina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Rivera-Garza, Cristina

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Rivera-Garza, Cristina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner): A Sister's Search for Justice

Liliana's Invincible Summer (Pulitzer Prize winner): A Sister's Search for Justice

Death Takes Me: A Novel

La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (Critical Mexican Studies)

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation (Critical Mexican Studies)

The Taiga Syndrome

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture